Guest Post: A Technique, A Celebrity and an Easy Process for Approval Rights by Karen Sperling
In the approximately 175 year history of photography, there have never been more creative tools at your disposal than there are today. Karen Sperling’s new book Painting for Photographers, takes you step by step into the art lessons you need to turn photographs into paintings with Corel Painter and Photoshop.
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about Karen is her motivating spirit. How many times have you looked at an image and thought, “I wish I had the artistic talent to do that!” Well, the whole premise of Karen’s new books is that if a photographer thinks he or she can create paintings, then he or she probably can. It’s not a technique for every client, every image or for that matter every photographer, but what a great way to expand your portfolio and your skill set!
The best part of working with Karen, though, has nothing to do with her artistic talent, but her enthusiasm, motivation and ability to teach a technique!
One of the things that intrigues me about creating paintings is that I like artistic problem solving. Some people do crossword puzzles, I devise painting techniques. There’s something grand about the sweet victory of unravelling an artistic mystery.
One such conundrum was how to paint a portrait with a textured background. I wanted a background in the style of the great masters like Rembrandt and John Singer Sargent, and I wanted to show clearly defined brush strokes.
The background effects that I was going to develop would be special, which meant the person in the foreground would need to be strong enough to justify the elaborate background.
That was the first problem: Who would be a forceful enough presence to counterbalance an inventive background?
The answer was, a celebrity. Not having any appropriate photos of famous people, I searched the internet for a suitable photo, which in itself became an interesting problem to solve.
Who to choose? And if I found a photo I wanted to paint, would I get permission to use the photo? I came across this photo of Oprah, which I thought was one of the best I’d seen of her, and a painting of Oprah would justify the elaborate background I had in mind.
The photo had a byline, Evan Agostini, who I found on Facebook, also through an internet search. I requested permission to use the photo and he agreed. First problem solved! By the way, this happened just before the Shepard Fairey image of Obama came out and the subsequent coverage and questions about Fairey using the source photo illegally. It never occurred to me not to ask permission to use the source photo for my painting of Oprah.
Once I had solved the problem of which photo to use, the question then became, which software program to paint with, and then, which brushes and settings inside the software programs to use. I experimented with a lot of different brushes and customized settings in Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop, and wound up using mostly Painter to achieve the result in the painting.
I used a “scrap” image, where I just played around with textures and brush strokes with various brushes on various settings, looking for clues to solve the artistic mystery. When I found the looks I liked, I then painted the actual image, solving the artistic mystery of how to paint a portrait with a textured background.
Case closed!
People always ask me, how do you know when a painting is done? The answer is, when you no longer have any problems to solve!
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