How to change a photo to an Art image is a question often asked – called “manipulation” by some and seems easy but isn’t easy at all.
What we don’t want to do is to take a photograph and turn it into an image that maybe is viewed at best as “painterly” – an expression I detest, but rather turn it into a proper work of Art. There should be little of the original photo and the resultant painting should have all the attributes of a painting – an expression or impression of the scene with a vibrancy and depth and life that all photo images lack.
This is our start photograph -
Hay-on-Wye, Herefordshire
A nice enough scene of a street in Hay-on-Wye in Herefordshire – I say Herefordshire advisedly as this is the official postal address although the larger part of town actually lies within Powys, which is the Welsh side of the Welsh/English border – somewhat confusing.
Anyway the “town of books” as it’s sometimes known is quite famous for having literally dozens of book shops selling every type of book from new to old to antique.
Many of the buildings are also quite old – after all the town has been around for nearly 1000 years.
However for my purposes the street scene here is ideal and I’ve decided to use it or part of it as my conversion to a painted image.
The part I’m interested in is the centre portion, the shop with the red door and the buildings either side. These give different roofs and renderings, plenty of colour contrasts and should make a nice image.
Usually I would remove any photographic distortions, such as lens perspective and barrel distortion before I even started, straighten up the verticals and so on, but sometimes – as in this case these are actually not an issue, so I’ll leave these as taken.
I’ll show two finished versions – the first with reasonable detail left (one of the secrets of painting from photographs is to simplify and remove much of the photo detail, as you simply do not need it for a rough painting).
The second version will be much more “artisan” in it’s approach with broad colour brush stroke effects added and will incorporate stronger, additional colouration on the older roof of the last building. Using a much more “impressionist” approach it will reflect damp roof moss and age and will lift the picture slightly accentuating the building character.
A true painting is all about what you feel – like the rough realism of the door, notices and windows – how they sit and how they fit with the overall scene – again impressions of what you see – an interpretation of the senses if you will.
Here’s the first with some details in -
Painting 01 - with some detail
Note the detail of the windows, notices and the roof tiling – plus the figure at the right walking out of the picture. Much of the base canvas can still be seen and the painting is quite light overall with the sketch outlines visible (of course these are virtual – as no real sketch was made here). Also note that even here there is hardly a trace of the original photograph as it’s becoming a quite different artform.
And then the “artisan painted” version -
Note here the figure has been removed, the signs, notices, window detail and roof detail are now much more impressionistic, more interperative. The colours though mostly unchanged appear heavier and more dense and odly whilst less defined have a presence that the first version lacked.
With the last image above the photograph has truly gone as if never there – it’s now become a completely different medium and this would in fact be even more so if I had actually been there painting this scene. Then I would hear the people, traffic and feel the wind and sense the smells, the air and absorb the atmosphere and vibrancy of the place.
Of course I was actually there when I took that photograph, but now by puting this down on paper or canvas and drawing it out, colouring it and using the positions of things and details in the photo as an aide memoire – I then use the memory – think back to that day, the weather, the senses alive and immerse myself in the feelings I had – my Impressions at the time -
and that’s the difference – and it is a VAST difference.
