Purple Poppy Painting

I have just finished painting this image of a purple poppy in Procreate.  This was based on an image I took in my old garden on Bainbridge Island.  I used to have mass quantities of these poppies which came up by themselves every year in that garden.  They were annuals, and each flower did not last very long.  I wanted to capture the essence of this ephemeral flower in this image.

To achieve this, I took several images of the flower and then focus stacked those images in Photoshop.  Then I further processed the image in Photoshop to bring out the color and detail of the flower.  I usually go overboard on that in Photoshop because I know I will then be painting the flower in Procreate, which wipes out some detail and color.  When I process the image in Photoshop, I also don't mind if that processing brings out noise and artifacts in the image, because the painting process will erase all those defects.  I also do not care much about what the background looks like in Photoshop because I can paint in whatever background I like in Procreate.

I will describe in more detail how I went about painting this in Procreate in my next blog post.

Resources to Help You Learn How to Do Photo Painting

As I mentioned in my second post on this blog, I first got into photo painting after attending a seminar by Fay Sirkis on the subject.  Her course, 'Paint Like a Master" is offered by Kelby Training.  I would give the link here, but Square Space is being weird and I find I have trouble embedding a link, so if you want to find her course, I suggest you google "Fay Sirkis Paint Like a Master".   That course was geared mainly to the Corel Painter program, but I have found that much of the instruction about using Painter is applicable to other painting programs in many, although not all, respects.  She also has several other digital painting courses on Kelby Training.  In addition, if you search Kelby Training you will find other courses on digital painting, but many of them are not really about the kind of photo painting I do.

After spending some time on Kelby Training, I switched to Lynda.com, which is a subscription site offering many courses on various programs, including courses on Photoshop.   In particular, John Derry has many courses on Lynda.com dealing with digital painting. I have watched a number of his courses on Lynda.com and I would recommend them.  If I were just starting out in photo painting, I think that these would be the best courses to watch.  Some of them are geared to Corel Painter, while others are geared to Photoshop.  In particular, I think his advice about how to set up your layers to optimize your digital painting experience in Photoshop is very helpful. 

Finally, more recently I have purchased a video download from Scott Deardorff called "Painting With The Mixer Brush In Photoshop".  While somewhat expensive, I thought this video was the best instruction I have seen on photo painting in Photoshop.  Scott Deardorff also has other videos available on his website, all of which look like they might be helpful.

None of these resources tell one how to use Procreate, although as I mentioned above, the principles of photo painting stay pretty much the same across different programs.  My best advice if you want to learn Procreate is to watch You Tube videos on Procreate.  There are many of these, some of which are more helpful than others,  I will discuss how I use Procreate to do my photo painting in future blog posts.