Purple Poppy Painting

I have just finished painting this image of a purple poppy in Procreate.  This was based on an image I took in my old garden on Bainbridge Island.  I used to have mass quantities of these poppies which came up by themselves every year in that garden.  They were annuals, and each flower did not last very long.  I wanted to capture the essence of this ephemeral flower in this image.

To achieve this, I took several images of the flower and then focus stacked those images in Photoshop.  Then I further processed the image in Photoshop to bring out the color and detail of the flower.  I usually go overboard on that in Photoshop because I know I will then be painting the flower in Procreate, which wipes out some detail and color.  When I process the image in Photoshop, I also don't mind if that processing brings out noise and artifacts in the image, because the painting process will erase all those defects.  I also do not care much about what the background looks like in Photoshop because I can paint in whatever background I like in Procreate.

I will describe in more detail how I went about painting this in Procreate in my next blog post.