Garden with Spring Showers

After yesterday's delightful sunshine, April showers have once again returned, although looking at the weather forecast for the week ahead it sounds as though we are in for some warmer and possibly sunnier weather.  I wanted to have another go at creating the "illustration" effect that I stumbled upon the other other week.  

It reminds me of illustrations that I have seen in children's books from the 1930s for some reason.

With that aim in mind, I started with a photo of the garden, deliberately taken with the following process in mind.  The Affinity recipe is as follows:

1. Duplicate the image as a new layer (its always worth doing this in case you decide that your fartnarkeling has gone too far and you want to revert to the original image);

2. Apply the "find edges" filter to this new duplicate layer.

3.  Now duplicate the filtered layer twice to create two new layers, set the opacity for the first new layer to "contrast negate" and the second to "subtract".

4. Now go back to the original unaltered layer that you kept at step one.  Copy this layer and add it as a new layer on top of the other layer, setting its opacity to "hue"  

5. Broadly once you have done steps 1 to 4 you will have created the effect that I am looking for, but it is possible to play around and add further layers to tweak the effect to your liking if you wish.  In this case I've added one last further unfiltered layer as a new top layer and set its opacity to "darken colour".

6. The final tweaks in this case involved my selectively blurring parts of the image to remove some of the more obvious granularity.

Why don't you have a go and see what you can do?