Kat Eye Studio

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Reminiscent of Tuscany: A Digital Painting from Start to Finish

This week for Paint Party Friday I thought I would share this digital painting, Reminiscent of Tuscany, and the process that I used to get there. I love how this one turned out! It’s been fun to experiment and see how things evolve.

Reminiscent of Tuscany

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? With the photograph. Driving in to my worksite from a different direction, I noticed these long skinny trees. Their shape and the way the light was hitting them reminded me of the Tuscan countryside, where the long, tall trees like this line the drives. So I asked my husband to drop me off in a different place, and I walked along the path at the edge of the property to photograph these trees. I had a plan for how I wanted these trees to look as a painting, so I walked around to view different angles and framed the photograph with that end goal in mind.

Later that night, on the bus ride home actually, I brought the photograph into the Glaze app and played around with painting effects until I got what I wanted. I was going for an effect that would smooth out the edges and details. I wanted mostly the shape and form of the trees, which is reminiscent of a painting style you will often see in modern paintings of the Tuscan countryside. Below was the final result. It’s not quite as smoothed out as I was envisioning, but as close as I could get.

I liked it at this point, but it didn’t “wow” me. A couple of days later I was participating in a Holiday Bazaar and was playing with images on my iPad during the slow times. I opened an app I hadn’t played with yet, InstaEffect FX, to see what it could do. I saw this wavy rainbow filter and had an “aha” – my tree painting needed some color! Here it is with the filter applied.

The sharp edges of the wavy lines needed to be painted a bit, so it was back into Glaze to “paint” those in. I have to admit, I haven’t quite figured out how to make Glaze do what I want yet, but after experimentation I usually get to where I want it to be. Here’s the final version out of Glaze:

The last bit was cropping. Even after the painting made them less obvious, I didn’t like the distraction of the other trees on the left side of the frame. I cropped them out with the Snapseed app, and here is the final result:

Reminiscent of Tuscany

It makes me smile. I love the bright colors, the shapes, and the memory it evokes for me of a different time and place. Whether it reminds anyone else of Tuscany is not really important.

It also marks an interesting shift… it’s the first time I’ve taken a photo specifically with an end painting in mind. Even though the end painting didn’t end up anywhere near the place I had envisioned it, the image was taken for that intent, and I’m happy with the result. Pretty cool, huh?

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Lessons in Painting with Photographs

My experimentation of digital/mobile painting with photographs continues this week and for Paint Party Friday I thought I would share a couple of lessons learned.

First Lesson: To make a good painting from a photograph, you first need a good photograph.

If you are going to end up with a painting that has interesting composition, contrast and a good focal point, the photograph you are working with has to start out that way. The principles of design apply the same. This was not so much of an “aha” moment as a “well, duh” moment for me this week. It seems obvious after the fact. If you take a poorly executed image and then apply some painterly filters to it, it doesn’t make it the image inherently better. It gives it a bit of a “wow” factor briefly due to the processing, but it’s not going to stand the test of time.

So all this work I do to improve and refine my photographic composition and design? It totally applies in this new endeavor. It also makes me think that my Paint Party Friday friends might want to start joining me in Exploring with a Camera, because I have no doubt if you improve your photographs you will improve your painting. (And November’s Exploring with a Camera posts tomorrow!)

Second Lesson: Not every good photograph will make a good painting.

I’ll share a little example of one of my failures this week. Let’s start with the photograph, as taken with my iPod Touch:

This arrangement of leaves was found outside my car door in a parking space. I spent some time framing it in an interesting way. I liked the color and size contrast of the focal point leaf and the seemingly artful way the smaller leaves were scattered around. I thought the contrast would make it a good candidate for a painting.

Unfortunately, I did not save most of my attempts, because they were so atrocious. The translation to the painting didn’t necessarily change the feel. Here’s one example, created with the Glaze app:

And here’s the best I got out of it, using the Line Brush app. This app has some really neat features, in that you can paint portions of your image and then remove the underlying photograph. That’s what I did here: painted the leaf, removed the photograph, and then used a different brush for more painting to blend the colors and edges. The problem with this app is that it seems to want a specific rectangular canvas side, and it rotates and crops any square images without giving a choice in composition. That’s why the end of the leaf is chopped off. Grrrr. I cropped the end result as best I could to get a decent composition, but it’s not what I would have chosen.

So after all of the playing with this image, I finally decided it was meant to stay a photograph. I edited it with a vintage filter to soften the yellow-black contrast, worked with the vignetting to even out the corners, did a small crop to get rid of a couple of distracting elements on the edges, and called it good.

Great lessons for me this week.

Not only that, as I was writing this post I finally checked the resolutions on some of the files I’ve been using (I’ve been meaning to do that for days) and discovered that the Photo Stream sharing feature through iCloud doesn’t transfer full resolution files between devices. So now I need to figure out how to transfer full res files between devices, so these can actually be printed larger than a postage stamp, and re-edit my favorite images at high resolution. I guess it’s better to discover this now than later. But wow, is there a learning curve with all of this stuff!

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