Working From A Photograph
Jeremy Sutton
In this article I want to share the creative process that went into creating Ballerina Sitting, explaining the choices I made. My intention is not to give you a precise formula or recipe to follow. Painter is a program that allows you to follow an intuitive path with every image. As you experiment you will develop your own techniques that work best for you and your images.
The final image
Starting With a Vision
When working from a photograph, my first step is to take a look at the complete photo and open myself to a vision of where the photo suggests going. This ballerina image inspired me to try a pastel approach that emulated the feel of a Edgar Degas drawing.
Fig 1
The original image open in Corel Painter 7
The Source Image
When you are working from a source photograph in Painter, I recommend making any resizing, rotation, cropping, hue, saturation, curves and levels adjustments in Photoshop first (using adjustment layers where appropriate) and then opening the file in Painter. For the type of image transformations that I do, where I make brush strokes over most, if not all, the image, I don’t worry about retouching fine details or making subtle color or tonal adjustments to the original photograph. In the case of this ballerina image I did not need to make any adjustments to the original.
It is generally best to work at the final size and resolution you want to end up with, though with the type of painterly impressionistic brushwork I use there is a lot of forgiveness in resolution. In this case my original image was 2008 x 3032 pixels.
Working on a Clone Copy
When working with photographs in Painter always work on a clone copy (duplicate), never directly on the original source image. After I opened the source image in Painter, I chose File > Clone and made a clone copy. There are two approaches you can take to working on a clone copy image, either leaving the photographic image there and working directly on top it (often good for more oily looks), or filling the canvas with white or an alternative background color, and then revealing the image, or your impression of the image. In this case I cleared the canvas to white.
I then renamed the cleared clone copy with the name “ballerina-01.rif”, saving it in the native RIFF format of Painter, the most versatile format in terms of preserving the editability of all aspects of the image. The “-01” in the file name is for version 01.
Turning the Script Recorder On
As soon as I renamed the working image I mounted it in screen mode (Cmd/Ctrl-M) and reduced it’s size on the screen so I could see the edges. I then opened the Objects palette > Scripts section. The Scripts section contains an immensely powerful but little used part of Painter that allows you to record and play back your entire painting process. I first did a select all which adds extra flexibility, then clicked on the red button in the Scripts section and then deselected and put the Objects palette to one side.
The Magic Clone Color Button
From
the Brushes palette I selected the Dry Media category > Artist Pastel
Chalk variant. This is a lovely chalky brush that picks up the paper
texture selected in the Art Materials palette > Papers section, in
this case the Basic Paper texture. I reduce the Grain slider in the Controls:Brush
palette from 23 to 15 to give a more distinct grain. I initially checked
the Clone Color button in the Art Materials palette color picker. This
caused the Artist Pastel Chalk to pick up it’s color from the original
file which was automatically defined as clone source when I did the clone
operation.
I
started with a medium opacity (56%), broad (46 pixel thickness) Artist
Pastel Chalk. The background strokes were diagonal, the strokes within
the figure followed the form of the figure, such as the folds of the
clothing and the flow of the hair, and the strokes on the ground were
horizontal.
There were some details in the image, such as selected features in the face, where I wanted to bring in the realism of the original photograph. To do this I selected the Cloners category > Soft Cloner, a soft-edged variant that brushes in the original photograph without any distortion. The Soft Cloner gives you the freedom to take risks and be bold with your transformations—no matter how messy you make an image you can always use the Soft Cloner to brush back the original. I dragged the icon for this variant into my shortcuts palette for convenient access.
Fig 2
Initial Artist Pastel Chalk brush strokes
Anytime I wanted to reference the original image I could just choose Cmd/Ctrl-T, which toggles tracing paper on and off. Tracing paper is where you can see a 50% opacity representation of the original clone source image superimposed over a 50% opacity representation of the working image.
I continued building up brush strokes on the background canvas, building up my paint like a traditional painter. To get a nice grainy soft edge to the image I used the Artists Pastel Chalk with a lower opacity (23%) and larger size (95 pixels). You can achieve a wide range of brush strokes from a single brush just by varying the opacity and size sliders.
Adding Color
I wanted to add touches of color that weren’t there in the original photo. I unchecked the Clone Color button in the Art Materials > Color picker and then selected colors by by picking up colors already in the picture, choosing complementary colors to those colors (complementary colors are pairs of colors located on the opposite side of the color wheel that have a vivid effect when juxtaposed next to each other). I also drew upon colors that were used by Fauvists such as Henri Matisse and André Derain.
Fig 3
Adding patches of color
I softly blended these color patches into the rest of the picture using the Artist Pastel Chalk with the Clone Color button rechecked and using the Liquid category > Just Add Water variant with soft pressure, low opacity (14%) and medium size (73 pixels).
I then filled in more of the background with the Artist Pastel Chalk, brought out more selected details with the Soft Cloner and did some final subtle softening with the Just Add Water.
When the drawing was complete I opened the Objects > Scripts section and pressed the black square stop button. I named the script and saved the final image with a new version number outside the script (important since it’s easy to accidentally overwrite versions saved within the script).
Changing Backgrounds
The
white background didn’t work for me. I realized that it needed
a darker pastel background. I’d already completed the drawing and
didn’t really want to start all over again. Fortunately all I needed
to do was to replay the script over a different background. In this case
I created a new clone copy from the original photo and then filled it
with a light brown color. I selected the script from the script library
pop-up menu and clicked on the green play button. I then sat back and
watched all my brush strokes magically replaying over this new background.
Fig 4
Replay of the painting process over a new background
hen the replay was complete I saved the resulting image as a TIFF file for printing out of Photoshop.
Printing
My two favorite output options are prints on canvas or water color paper, depending on the particular image. This ballerina image is an example where the water color paper option worked well (I used my Epson 2200 with Matte Black ink cartridge and the Epson Velvet Fine Art 13 x 19 inch paper).
The script is a small text file that records everything you do. The replay is a smooth continuous replay that can be paused at any point You can also use the script as infinite undo to get to any point in your painting process or to check which brush settings you used at different times.
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