In my never ending quest to create more artistic and unique images, I am starting to explore more textural overlays. There is a photographer/artist named Jesh de Rox who is amazing with this and I purchased some really cool texture files from him to use during the image editing process.
Here’s a sample from my first attempt:

In my quest to learn Corel Painter, I came across an amazing artist named Jeremy Sutton who works/teaches out of San Francisco. Jeremy has a fantastic set of DVD’s where he teaches some of his painting techniques. You can see some of Jeremy’s work here: http://www.jeremysutton.com/glry-theme-artists.html

One of the techniques that he teaches on his DVD set is a watercolor technique. Here is my first attempt after watching his DVD’s. I still have a long way to go, but it’s a fun learning process.

I’m developing a new artistic product called The Pirlo which is a blend of photography, graphic design, and painting. The final images will be printed on a fine art canvas and framed in a rustic brown molding. Right now, I’m learning, playing, experimenting, etc.

Well, it’s been many months since I’ve had the time to break out Corel Painter. I played around for a little while…trying to get familiar with the tools and million different options.

Another Painting

I just received my upgrade to Corel Painter IX.5 and I had a little time to play around tonight and paint one of my pics from Africa.

Bringing painting into our business will hopefully eventually lead to a unique and exciting product that will add a significant amount of depth to our product offering. Turning images into paintings is a difficult and time consuming process that requires artistic and technical ability far beyond photography. I know I still have a lot to learn in this realm and with more practice, I am excited about using this as a future product line.

I just bought a book called Painter IX for Photographers by Martin Addison to help me in my process to learn Painter.
Below is a sample image from their tutorial CD that I painted using Painter.

I spent a little more time attempting to turn artwork into paintings that can be printed on canvas. It will be a long process…learning how to use the computer to produce artwork, but I think I’m making some good progress. I’m hoping that it will be very interesting to look back on this blog in a few years from now to see advancements and progress. I’m currently working on using multiple software programs. I’m attempting to prep photographs using photoshop and various photoshop actions and filters and then bringing those images into painter to apply manual paint and brush strokes.

These last couple of days have really reflected how difficult it can be to run a business. Taking photos and doing a job that we love is really exciting to do but more than half of the business is the not fun background stuff that has to be done. Scheduling, website maintenance, contracts and paperwork, etc. etc. I spent so much time these last few days getting the books in order and learning more tricks and accounting practices with Quickbooks, etc. etc.
Now that we’re in our slow season, I’m hoping to spend some time learning more fun stuff…playing with the Painter software and things like that which will hopefully help get my mind off of the mundane. Here’s a small portion of a sample painting that I had done using Painter last year. Just like any program, there is so much to learn.