Original Photo is the property of Ken Chambers
and was posted at Innographx as a digital art challenge.
I painted it using Painter 7
I use an Intuos 3 tablet. If you haven’t done so already, go into your preferences/brush tracking, and set it in accordance with your own pen pressure. This makes a world of difference, as does the size of the photo in relation to your brush variant settings.
I took Ellisha’s photo into PhotoShop first to resize to about 12 inches wide. The levels were ok, and I sharpened it with USM a little, then brought it into Painter, cloned, and made tracing paper.
The light on her face is coming from her left, so that’s where I wanted the least detail. In real watercolors, I would begin with the line drawing, but I work backwards in Painter and do the colorwash first; that may just be me.
This screen capture shows some of the brush settings, and I zoomed in to show the color variations that the watercolor fine cloner leaves in her hair. (Other settings include wetness 297, pickup 58, dry rate 90, evap. th.81, diffusion 90, well resat 54, and bleed 3) I stroke the brush along the lines of her hair and lightly block in the contours of her face and body. Then I turn off the original layer below to work on details.
The colors I saw in this photo were gold, charcoal, and a peachy pink. I took the eyedropper and selected the charcoal and tweaked it to a soft baby blue for a fourth color. I made a new watercolor layer, chose the flat wash watercolor brush, and began lightly laying down a blue and peach background, also brushing some blue into her jacket. I didn’t much like my results, but I didn’t delete it, just turned it off and made another watercolor layer and tried again. I ended up using them both at 50% opacity.
Next I made another layer for the outline and chose the 2B pencil. I didn’t want my drawing to be overpowering or painfully accurate. I used my artistic license to exaggerate her eyelashes, something I do when painting children, pretty women or gorgeous guys. I indicated strands of hair, outlined portions of her sweater, mouth and hands, but not every square inch of them.
Finally, I gave it a sandstone texture in PhotoShop. Let me know if anything here isn’t clear.
cat bounds
