Some photographs have rather unique challenges. This weekend I started on a project that had both yellow saucer glow eyes and a nasty grain texture that I can only guess resulted from scanning in a photo that was printed on poor quality paper or something. I started my work by putting a smart blur on the entire image to reduce the funky grain texture, then I started smudging and painting in some crisp detail that was lost in the blurring process. Of course I had to create the eyes from scratch and I am crossing my fingers that they are the right shade of brown. Without a reference photo that would tell me the correct coloring I just had to guess. I am very pleased at how well this project has turned out. This Golden looks like an old guy and I just adore senior pets.
Oh and yea, I am rather excited about this new circle background. It is a common enough graphic design technique that is "halftone pattern" with circle chosen. I have taken it a messy step or two further however and made it painterly and not quite so crisp and 2 dimensional. I am keeping those final steps to myself this season .... some things can be secret sauce after all.
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9 comments:
Great artwork! I'm addicted to my Wacom tablet too. I love your brushwork.
That is a wonderful transformation! Great work!
rebecca,
your work is magical!
xo
m
You did a great job fixing these problems. I hope you got the right color for the eyes. I did a portrait last year that the dog appeared to be black in all the photos. When the owner saw the completed work online she emailed me telling me it was great but the dog was chocolate brown. Ugh! I had to go back and repaint him. Makes me laugh now!
Great again! Yes, the circular background is super. Works well with this calm dog expression...
holy Cow! they gave you that to work with and you turned it into a wonderful piece!! amazing ;)
This may sound really crazy Rebecca but this year I tried a first for glowing eyes. I actually copied the eyes from another dog and placed them on the glowing eyes dog. Mind you they were the exact same color and shape, and I pretty much erased every part except the pupil and catchlights. It was the catchlights that made the dog look so much more real. And because I retained most of his actual eye, it didn't look cloned at all, and still looked like 'him'. I will try and remember to post a before and after after the holidays (it's a Christmas gift). I will be doing this now with every chance I get. SO much easier.
Gorgeous work as usual. You are a master!!
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