Fun with Photoshop - Moving birds and butterflies

As you may know, one of the great advantages of painting digitally is being able to move things around within the image. Of course you can do that in a real oil painting by painting over something and repainting it elsewhere. But that's obviously a lot of work, and destroys the original painting. With a digital painting I can modify things quickly and easily, and still keep the original version intact.

I don't want to go around modifying things for no reason, however. I want to keep even my digital paintings unique. So modifying one just for the sake of a little variation is not what I want to do. But sometimes there's a good reason. Here's an example.

I wanted to put this painting of bluebirds and a yellow birdhouse on various products in my Zazzle store. The printable area on some products is square, some rectangular, some round. This image works fine as is for the square and rectangular products, but not so much for the round ones. Cropping a circle out of the image above would result in important elements being cut off, like this:

Not only is the upper bird's wing cut off, but the monarch butterfly has been cut in half, and the blue butterfly is completely out of the picture now.

So, to make things fit more nicely within a circle, I went back to my original layered PSD file and moved the upper bluebird and the two butterflies in closer to the birdhouse. Now, as you can see below, all the fit neatly on round objects like this decorative porcelain plate...

Bluebirds and Yellow Birdhouse Porcelain Plates by ForestWildlifeArt

...or this round accent throw pillow....

Bluebirds and Yellow Birdhouse Round Pillow by ForestWildlifeArt

...and this wall clock....

Bluebirds and Yellow Birdhouse Wallclock by ForestWildlifeArt

So, as you can see, it's not a dramatic change. At first glance it still appears to be the exact same image. So it still keeps the integrity of the original version. Only on closer inspection do you realize things have slightly. This little adjustment is worth it to keep all the important elements within the circle boundaries, making the end result a much nice picture than if I'd simply chopped things off.

See more items with bluebirds and butterflies in my Zazzle Store here.