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Ever wanted to create a painting out of, say, a photograph of a beloved person, but were stumped by the difficulty? Now you can! Here I'm going to tell you how to fake oil paintings (or any other type of technique) so only an expert would be able to tell.
To do this you need the following:
- A color photograph (doesn't matter how old, digital or paper)
- An image editing program like Adobe Photoshop
- A color printer, preferably laser because its "ink" doesn't fade as easily
- Standard-size card stock
- A glazing gel that you need to buy in an arts store: get the super heavy, gloss kind. Here's a link to the brand I use.
And here's the process:
If your photograph is on paper, you need to scan it first, or take a picture of it with a digital camera (quicker, but beware of reflections). Then open it in your image editing program (I use Photoshop, so the instructions will be based on that program). Here's a sample picture of Mother Teresa, taken from Internet.
Next you need to crop it and remove extraneous material. Bear in mind that a portrait should focus on the subject, so other stuff should be eliminated or blurred into the background. For this picture, I don't need to crop it so the face is the main element, so I use the clone stamp tool to extend the red on the background so everything behind the subject has a common pattern. Placing a selection lasso aroundthe background as I use the clone tool helps ensure that the face won't be accidentally modified.
This is a good time to figure out how it's going to be printed. I want to use a cheapo frame for an 8x10 photograph ($2 at Walgreens). The visible area for this kind of frame is 7 5/8x9 5/8 inches, so I will resize the picture so it is 7.7 inches wide, maintaining proportions (or not, if you want to create your very own El Greco). After resizing, the picture is a bit longer than 9.7 inches, so I will cut it manually when I put it in the frame. You can also re-crop in photoshop so the lenght is also all right.
The picture is a little noisy (consequence of the high ISO rating it was shot at), so I run it through a reduce noise filter to smooth that out. If too much noise remains in the picture, it will be translated as spurious micro-brushstrokes, which look funny.
Once I'm happy with the composition and the smoothness of the original picture, I'm ready for the artistic process. Occasionally a picture is so poor that it will need adjustment (levels, hue and saturation, maybe some retouching with the dodge and burn tools) before it's acceptable. But don't worry too much because next phase will obliterate most of the detail of the photograph anyway.
I save the current progress, and then duplicate the layer (Ctrl-J in photoshop). From now on, I'll work with the new layer. The next thing is to run it through the virtual painter filter. Art Master Pro, by fo2pix does a similar effect, but it is more difficult to use. Virtual painter can be run standalone or as a photoshop plugin, which is what I did. Once in virtual painter, I select the oil painting slider and play around with the settings until I like the final product. It is important to set deformation to zero, so I can do the next step. Here's the picture:
Now the upper layer has something that closely resembles an oil painting, except that the colors are a bit too strong for my taste. No problem. I set that layer to be "Luminosity" instead of "Normal" (on the layers palette), so photoshop only takes the brushstroke pattern from that layer, and the colors from the original picture.
If that still isn't right for the subject, I can fix that by adding some adjustment layers (saturation, contrast, or both) between the two picture layers. I play around with the settings of the adjustment layers and the way they relate to the other layers (sometimes a "screen" or "overlay" setting works better than "normal") until I like what I see. I save my work and make a high-quality jpg file from the final result . The picture below has a brightness/contrast layer added as "multiply" and a hue/saturation layer added as "overlay" between the two picture layers:
Then I go to the laser printer (it's attached to another machine) and print the image on the heaviest paper I can find. You can also print on canvas (not on the treated side!), but this usually desaturates the picture and the more realistic weave doesn't compensate for it. This is the time to sign in, using a marker or whatever you think is best, because the next operation will seal the image so it cannot be added to.
And now, the final, magic touch. I take a brush and dab the gel on my creation, taking care to follow the printed strokes as faithfully as I can. Whenever an area calls for extra paint (say, an eye, or a small, complex object like an earring), I add more gel and let it bulge up. After the gel dries clear, there is no way to tell it is actually transparent and all the color is in a flat layer underneath. The paper will curl up a bit because the gel is water-based, hence the need to print on the heaviest paper available.
And that's it! After the gel dries, the picture is ready for mounting on a frame (no glass), and everyone will believe you spent countless hours fussing with paint and brushes.
Below is the sequence of all the steps in the process. Click on each image to zoom in.
