Mr. Vest's process of creating the American eagle digital paintings on display.
People that comment on my Images are often baffled by my technIques-- so this is how I developed the finished digital paintings. There's a great deal of trial and error in my process, which is why a VERY comprehensive description would be difficult. suffice it to say that photoshop is a great tool.
As you see In the completely different backgrounds for the two eagle paintings on my 1st page, now I have a hundred times more flexibility in creating. I digitally painted the eagle's details, based on a series of photos like the one below. I photographed this guy in a big cottonwood tree in jackson hole about ten years ago. Again, it's an okay shot, but certainly not exceptional.
Photoshop provides the tools to extract the eagle from the tree. I have to stress that while photoshop is amazing-- it isn't magic. the process of extracting the eagle from this photo was fairly time consuming because of all the clutter of branches.
once I had the eagle out the picture, I had two tasks: to repaint him with all the details I wanted, and to find him a home in a better background than the cluttered cottonwood. for the first, I have a drawing tablet which allows me to simulate "real" painting digitally. unlike real painters, I don't have to mix colors, I merely touch anything with my drawing pen to automatically extract that precise color. I didn't like that the "real" view looks up at the eagle, so I painted him to look as if we're looking straight at him and -- based on my knowledge and reference of eagles, I painted in the details and feathers that were left out because the bird photo Is slightly underexposed.
because photoshop allows me to build images in layers (much like the old Walt Disney artists used mechanically to simulate depth of field) now the spiffed up bird can "float" above any background I chose to place behind him. I have this marvelous fence post, taken here on my farm. the uncooperative kingbird captured here looked away, making this a bad bird picture, but it's a great fencepost picture. exactly the way I pulled out the eagle from his original background, I pulled out this fencepost and barbwire I place the eagle In the right spot on this fence post and painted out the branch where the eagle previously resided.
last year on a trip to jackson hole, I photographed a bunch of elk at the national elk refuge. the elk that appear in this image are from that trip. similarly, the mountaIn back there is from a photo looking toward a prominent slope called the sleeping Indian. on still another layer, I painted in a light fog to create an effect of both fog AND to help with perspectIve. photoshop lets me control opacity of layers so that by just touching a slider, I can look at the fog layer as a total 'white out', or as just a very light haze.
the willows and lone spruce are from a photo taken behind my brother's condo in downtown Jackson, right on the waterway called flat creek. I digitally erased the power lines and buildings that I didn't want in the image. finally I photographed a gesso-ed board that had the strong brush strokes applied to it and dropped it over the top. where it looked obtrusive, I erased it; if the effect was too strong, I diminished the opacity; It's there to create the illusion of a paInted board.
and so on and on. the final picture has 19 layers because every time I introduce a new idea or element, it goes on a new layer. that's because I want to review the effect of that layer in combInatIon wIth the other layers-- I can turn layers off and on, I can control their opacity, and I can control hue and saturation and many other effects-- all by touching the software's fIngertip controls. at 300 dp I and 20 inches across, this baby takes almost a gigabyte of memory: enormous when you consider that the fIrst computer floppy discs could store 2 megabytes! we've come a long long way In just fifteen years. 
so on the second image-- you get the idea-- wIth a free floating eagle layer, I just tried him in a background similarly built, but this one of an overlook near here looking toward mesa verde national park. I recycled this image of mine from photonet: http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_Id=8186226
Well, that is probably more than you wanted to know. so what we've got is a photo-montage, but also "painted"-- part photography, part painting. it's an evolving medium--currently we manage to offend both the real painters AND the photographers, so like all new processes, there is a 'break-in' period before the photo-montage painters like me gain full legitimacy in the art world.
