In the Studio Today... Family Portrait Commission

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

(18" x 24". Click image, above, to enlarge)

I spent most of the month of September, working on this family portrait commission. It was a combination of 4 photos; all heads composited first in Photoshop, and then a color change to "Cobalt Blue", the recipient's favorite color. This is an 18" x 24" canvas.

I am working on establishing a portion of my website dedicated to family portraits, ballet, and child portraits. I currently do not have much of this on my site, as I have primarily focused on the Marin Landscape, with occassional buildings or cycling figures thrown in. Portraits are very tedious work, and literally back breaking. I was lucky enough to be able to get to a pool to swim today, after a session of 5 hours straight at the canvas to finish the painting.

I hope the family truly enjoys this gift. I am so glad to have reconnected with some of my East Coast friends on Facebook, and how great to be able to do some work for them. I have had two commissions from old High School friends recently, and it is really nice. Friends helping friends. Hope to do more of these paintings in the future. I enjoy getting back to the days when I painted from models for hours. I need to dig out some of my portrait work from College days. That would be fun to share.

In the Studio Today... Digital Compositing Example

Modern day painters can use Photoshop to create their reference imagery, and I do that fairly often when I need to combine imagery. Here is an example of a project I did for a client in CT, who wanted a portrait of their sheep, Jelly, but the photo provided was under copyright protection by a newspaper. I attempted to find the photographer at a local paper in CT for approval to use the above image, but the paper could not find the photographer. Instead of "copying" this image that was protected, I suggested to the client that we composite it into another photograph that he had taken himself. He had an image of their other adult sheep, B.B. in a magical, misty New England forest scene that had fantastic lighting. I loved this photo right away, but Jelly, the sheep for whom their farm is named after(Jelly Hill Farm), was not in this photo. I removed Jelly from the copyrighted photograph in Photoshop, and placed her into the scene with B.B. This involved changing Jelly's shading and coloring to match the lighting in the scene with B.B., and add an additional shadow on in the foreground in front of Jelly. Once the client agreed on the final composite, I began painting the commission from the composited final image.And below is the final painting...