Illustration Friday - Storm

My February Illustration Friday is a kind of two-fer.  First I created the painting, joining two photos from stock.xchange and using both Photoshop and Topaz filters on several copies.  The ornate frame came from the Frames and Borders group on Flickr. And the lightning is from a set of 40 lightning bolt brushes downloaded from psdbox.com.

Then once you have a painting, well, it should hang in a gallery, shouldn't it?  And, of course,  you need some viewers to appreciate it.  So I collected some individuals from Flickr via Creative Commons and removed them from their backgrounds using a trial version of Topaz ReMask.  I didn't take much time to learn its intricacies, as my goal was to get this finished, so they aren't as good as they could be.  I wanted to create the impression that their hair and garments were being blown by a wind coming out of the painting.  I added a little splash of water also coming out of the painting onto the wall, but I'm not sure if it reads as such.  I used Topaz BuzSim filter on one copy of the group of people to try to unify them.

After spending the better part of two days glued to my computer, I just managed to finish this in time.  It was a bit complicated, but it does resemble the vision I had in my mind's eye.