No Fences (Patreon)

Another calm Kansas landscape scene I can add to my realism section of the portfolio. It all starts with a good reference. I like to crop and modify colors of a photo to get as close as I can to the final look I'm going for. Then, it's a matter of spotting the best colors from the image and recreating the composition in a manner that best suites the pixels. Not creative in concept, but a great deal of personality comes through in the clusters, color treatment, and tweaks in composition. While there are many colors and the real look makes it seem complex, a modest resolution makes things fairly easy to manage. The smaller the resolution the more creative you have to get with the clusters. Go too big and you'll basically be tediously recreating the photo with little artistic value. I'm most comfortable in the 100 to 300px range.

230x97px
54 colors
Photoshop