This year I am participating both in a 365-day and a 52-week photo challenge. For the first one I post an image (old or new) every day on Instagram. For the latter one I need to take or create an image a week on a certain topic. This week our topic was “Symmetry”. I kind of ran out of time to go on a photoshoot, so I ended up creating my image. 
A few days ago I found a piece of wood that had fallen off of a palm tree. I picked it up and took it home. Sometimes I do stuff like that… When I looked at the piece it sparked my imagination; I saw it being the wing of a butterfly. 
First, I took a picture of it on a grey piece of cloth, just using my iPhone. The rest of the steps were done in Photoshop.

As a first step I cut out the wood from the background, then reflected it to create a butterfly shape. I’ve added a background and some textures, as well as a butterfly shaped stamp. This layer also received some textures.

Then I experimented with blend modes and different lighting effects. Finally I added a color effect and contrast, and ended up with this final image:

The goal of this creation was not to come up with a super realistic image, rather the symmetry was my main purpose. Therefore, I left shadows in the picture that clearly give away that this is not a real moth.
This was such a fun exercise!

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