This is the second part of my blog post about how I got to this point in creating my digital art. In the last post, I recounted how I got into photography and learned Photoshop. Here I will explain how those interests escalated into digital painting.
When I was first learning Photoshop i learned a lot from Scott Kelby's books on both digital photography and Photoshop. Scott Kelby also offered one day seminars which occasionally came to Seattle. I took one of these, given by Fay Sirkis, called (I think), "Paint Like a Master". This course is still available from Kelby Training as an online course. This was my first introduction to what is called 'Photo Painting'. This is a method of digital painting whereby a photograph is used as the underlying layer, and the digital brush basically smears around the 'paint' picked up from the pixels in the photograph. Imagine, if you will, an oil painting in which the canvas is completely wet and the paint on the canvas can be smeared in any way by the brush. That, in a nutshell is what photo painting is.
It is important to remember that the smearing of the paint is done by a person (in this case, me) wielding a digital brush. That smearing is not done by a filter which is applied to the whole image, as in sometimes the case in so called digital painting. Rather, in photo painting all the pixels on the finished canvas have been applied by a human using a digital brush, but the paint colors and the forms painted have (generally) been taken from the underlying photograph. The painter is also free to add additional paint not found in the photograph to add details or otherwise change the photograph as he or she desires. Indeed, most teachers of photo painting tell their students to basically smear the original photo so much that all detail is wiped out, and only an underpainting remains, and then to add back detail as necessary.
Since I don't want to bore the readers of this blog with too long an explanation at any one time, I will continue my explanation of this process in the next blog post.