I was working on a picture of a horse, and the picture of the horse was very beautiful. The background and things were going well, but one thing that bugged me was all the tack on the horse. I can remove bridles, but saddles not so much. It doesn’t look real whenever I do it.

My method is to use the sample picker to select a colour right next to the bit of tack I want to remove, then use a small brush to paint over the little bit of tack right next to where I chose that colour from. I do that all the way up the tack, and then use a smudge or blend tool to blend this colour into the rest of the horse. It works very well with bridles, head collars and other small things, but as you can imagine, it doesn’t work with large pieces of tack, like saddles, too well. When I get into the middle of the tack, I’m really just guessing the colour.

So that got me thinking. What methods does everyone else use? Got any tips for removing saddles and things? Or maybe you just avoid them all together?

xx Sugar xx

Oh, and I use Gimp