Painted Portrait – Butch

Let’s face it, most of us really don’t like to have our picture taken.  I know that I’m one of those people who is never pleased with pictures of myself.  And, as a photographer who has taken pictures of a LOT of people over the decades (I know, I’m old as dirt), I’ve heard it all.  So, it’s really nice to GET a good picture of someone who feels that they haven’t ever had a descent picture taken of themselves.  Then, once you’ve done that, it’s even better to take it to the next level and turn it into a painted portrait.

In this case, I did a lot of cleanup work in Photoshop;  taking out some distracting background material, cropping, etc. Then, I decided to do this portrait using pastel brushes and some chalk to smooth things out in many areas.  Here’s a closeup of the facial area.

This portrait was printed on a beautiful Fine Art Paper with a lot of surface texture and is a Christmas gift for the family.  If I may say so myself, it looks great, and when the family saw it, they agreed!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and that a Happy New Year will follow!  I’m on to the next painted portrait, and I’m excited about a style that I think I have settled on for it.  I’ve finished the work in Photoshop, and the portrait looks fantastic, now to the painting part.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 5:00 pm. It is filed under Portraits and tagged with painted portrait, painterly, pastel portrait, pastels, portraits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.