Exploring Digital Painting

As an artist I explore many avenues of expression - always searching, experimenting, exploring different techniques and methods to create the vision I have in mind.

My main tool for expressing my vision is a camera, and the photographs I take are often just the base of the final piece of work I present. I use the digital darkroom to modify my photographs, to tranform the image I captured into the vision I have in mind.

What follows is an example of what I do with a photograph. This is an image I took of a blooming red Camelia, surrounded by snow from a recent storm. The red flower in the snow was striking, but it also reminded me of all the color that will come with warmer weather in the spring.

Here is the original photograph.

I took this image into the digital darkroom, Adobe Photoshop, and made modifications. I used different brushes to paint in the colors of spring, layering shades of the flower's own warm red into the background. All together the working file had ten layers of enhancements and painted effects. Finally, I cropped the image into a square shape.

This image is the result.

I was looking to create a glowing picture of the beauty found in winter, and the promise of more color to come in the spring. The original image and the painted image are both beautiful, and I know some will prefer one over the other. The end result, the painted image, is the image I envisioned when I began creating.