Howard The Hare

So folks, my late entry for this week's Sunday Challenge, which had the theme of texture, features Howard the Hare.

I’ve been looking to photograph Howard, perhaps for the purpose of a Sunday Challenge, ever since he was given to me by my wife as a gift.

This cold cast resin sculpture is one of a series produced by celebrated artist Paul Jenkins. Many of his pieces are inspired from direct observations of wild animals in their natural habitat and I’ve been an admirer of his work, especially the hares, for quite a while so was delighted to be given this as a gift.

As soon as I saw this week’s challenge was texture, I immediately thought of using Howard as he himself has a lovely handcrafted texture.

Howard normally lives indoors, but for this challenge I took him out into the garden as I wanted to try and produce a photograph of him that would eventually look like a painting of a hare in the wild. I sat him atop a large boulder and carefully positioned some potted plants around him to give what I hoped would be a naturalistic backdrop.

Once I had a shot I was happy with the next challenge was how best to process the shot and what textures to use to give the desired effect.

I opened the photo in PaintShopPro X2, which is my weapon of choice in such matters, and used the posterize effect to make the image slightly less realistic looking. Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough to lose the definition on the plant leaves and so the overall effect was still to realistic. Howard was looking good, but the leaves were still proving problematic.

So I created a duplicate layer of the overall photo and treated the top layer to some PSP brush strokes, which really started to make the leaves look like they were painted. Next, I deleted Howard from the top layer to allow the less processed hare to show through from the lower layer.

All that remained was to try and do something with textures, an area of processing I have little experience. PSP does have a canvas effect, but I didn’t feel it looked quite right so I got an old bit of carpet down from the loft and photographed the backing. I then copied the image into PSP and used it as a texture on the shot of Howard.

It took a bit of fiddling around to get the opacity levels right, but I think in the end I got what I’d set out to achieve … something that looked like a painting of a hare in the wild.

Looks better I think when viewed large.

Oh, and if you want to know more about Paul Jenkins, follow the link below to his official website where you will find examples of his latest ceramic and resin bronze sculptures:

www.pauljenkinsgallery.co.uk