Four Horses, Four Ways

Highnam Court Gardens, Gloucestershire. Very beautiful, and with lots of amazing wooden sculptures set throughout. One of my favourites is of four horses, created by Dave Bytheway to commemorate the visit of The Prince of Wales to the gardens in 2010. The entire sculpture sweeps upwards, but my picture concentrates on just two of the horses.

This is it, a balance of the wooden horses in their wooded environment.


But something about the colour range doesn't quite work for me. I'm not a big user of Photoshop, but I thought it might be fun to play about a little bit with this picture so I went to find a little help in the form of a manual.

I started with a conversion to black & white - didn't need the manual for that one!


Needs something else... Perhaps a bit of blurring of the trees, and some drybrushing of the horses:

Still not sure the horses stand out enough. Let's try something else:

This one did need some help from the book with as I wanted to create a kind of 'other worldliness' about the image.

Four ways of looking at some wooden horses. Hmm, perhaps I prefer the third version after all.

Which do you prefer?