The Virtual Sketchbook
Using Your Computer and Photoshop Software to Compose Your Painting
By Patrick Fanning
This is a view of the main street in Samara, Costa Rica, where I was teaching a plein air workshop. I had a great time sketching and painting in town, with the usual problem of people not holding still and posing. When I got home I wanted to do one large studio painting that would sum up my whole two week experience and express the casual charm of this Pacific coast beach town.
I used the Photoshop
program to combine four pictures from my digital camera. It often takes several
photos to cover all the details you want to include in this kind of street
scene.
Picking & Choosing
I liked the truck and the perspective of the photo
above, but I wanted to include the palm trees and surf shop from the photo
below.
From three other snapshots I
selected, cut and pasted a group of women and a girl on a bike. Photoshop
allows you to flip, resize, crop, cut out, and paste photos with ease. For
example, Photoshop’s “Flip Horizontal” command
allowed me to get these women facing the way I wanted.
Wrong Light: The
back lighting on this figure doesn’t match the other photos, so I had to change
it.
Below is the composite photo “sketch.” I used Photoshop’s drawing and painting tools to create a gradation in the
foreground and block in some cast shadows. I brought the telephone pole on the
right down in front of the surf shop. Since I was more
interested in combining large shapes and figures than in creating a polished
piece of trick photography, I could very quickly try out different compositions
and ideas. I didn’t worry about minor
glitches such as the telephone wires in the sky that don’t match up. The
hacked-up, rough quality of the composite photo was actually a boon, because it
allowed me to make up my own color scheme, invent a light source, and resolve
small details at the painting stage.
And here is the
finished painting, Well Met in Samara, Watercolor, 22x30 Experimenting
With Color & Without
Color
On the other hand, sometimes you’d like to eliminate
color entirely, to see the values better.
Turning a Good Photo In the Photoshop sketch version, the fence and trees in the background
have been flipped to the left and a barn from another photo has been added in
the upper left to balance the mass of buildings on the right. A bit of sky was
added to show some hill tops. Notice how the greens have been tweaked: lighter
and most intense in the foreground, neutralized in the middle ground, and much
grayer in the background. This adds depth and variety. I extended the dirt road
in the middle ground so that it winds around the buildings, up the hill, and in
front of the fence in the background. In the painted version, I added a figure from my
sketchbook. The dry creekbed in the foreground has become a dirt road leading
into the scene. The buildings are simplified and shifted to show more of the road
winding through the composition. Finished Painting Fixin Up the Old Place, (Watercolor, 15x22)
About Photoshop Adobe’s Photoshop program is big, complicated, and
expensive. However, abridged versions such as Photoshop Elements are often
included free when you buy a new printer or digital camera. This “Photoshop
lite” version is still plenty powerful for artists who want to use the program
as a virtual sketchbook. When I got serious about learning Photoshop, I took a
course at my local junior college. This qualified me to purchase the
educational edition of the program at about half price, and the in depth
training was very helpful. Last updated 3/27/03 
Into a Better Composition
This is a pretty good photo, but it presents come
problems: All the buildings are on the right side. The dry creek bed in the
foreground isn’t a very strong lead-in to the picture. The background is boring
and oppressive because you can’t see the sky. Finally, there’s too much high
intensity green.
