Edit This Contest - Valley with Airplane

Occasionally Fine Art America has an "Edit This" contest. They provide an image and ask us to edit it to make it our own piece of art. They do want the original photo to be recognized in some way. They then have a contest and vote for the best design.

For this one, they provided a photo of a valley with an airplane flying over. Above you can see the before and after photos. I did a variety of edits in Gimp and Lightroom to come up with this final mixed media art piece.

I first started off by replacing the sky with another photo I had taken of a double rainbow during a rain storm over a golf course. I wanted to leave some of the trees and golf course in the photo. However, my photo was taken during the summer season so everything was a little more green then the provided photo. There was also a hint of yellow/orange tones from the evening sun. In order to fix this, I added some green and yellow/orange colored layers. This helped enhance the green in the fields and the brown hillside. I also cloned some of the trees from my photo into the hillside in various areas of the provided photo. This helped tie everything together a little more.

The brighter section in the clouds gave me the idea to add in a bolt of lightning I had captured in another photo. After adding it, I added a hint of some more extra light to the clouds. To sharpen up everything and make it even more unique, I turned into into a painting using a couple of different painting techniques. To finish up, I opened the edited photo in Lightroom to enhance the colors, and clarity. After adding keywords and a description, my art piece was finished. What do you think?

Keep posted for an update on the contest.

Here's the link to the final photo: https://5-jennifer-white.pixels.com/featured/getting-ahead-of-the-storm-painterly-jennifer-white.html
Here's the link to the contest: https://fineartamerica.com/contests/edit-this-2020-1.html

Update: On January 31, 2020 I was announced as the winner of this contest! So exciting. Here's the link to the winners: https://fineartamerica.com/contests/edit-this-2020-1.html?tab=leaderboard