I was playing around with painting over images again this evening. Nothing special. This time I painted over a picture of Lan’s niece from a few years back. She’s the one who drew our Christmas cards this year.
To “paint” an image I open the photo in Photoshop and then draw on layers inserted over the image. I use the eye dropper to sample actual colors in the photo as a way to determine the brush colors. To pull this off I use lots of layers. After awhile it gets a bit confusing which layer is which but I find it easiest to undo mistakes if I use layers rather than relying on the undo buffer. I also try to draw the darker, solid areas in bottom layers and then add highlights on top of them in separate layers.
One other trick is to draw the image bigger than you want in the final version. Reducing the image as a last step often hides little imperfections. The downside is that sometimes the fine details that you sweat over tend to disappear.
In this case, I spent about an hour working on the photo until I started getting too picky trying to make the image look right.
Nice image. What motivated you to do the drawing? Are you a closet artist in a digital shell? I think the coolest things is when dreams surface into reality.
Did you do it on a Tablet PC?
Keep pushing it, who knows where it will go.