Painted Portrait – Cynthia

One of the great aspects of the digitally painted portrait, is the ability to control the AMOUNT of painting that you do. It can be very heavy, impressionistic brush strokes, or it can be just a very light touch. You can combine the two, where one area is more painterly, and then you choose to do just a soft touch on the facial areas.

This San Francisco area client sent me a two megabyte jpg photo that had been taken of his wife. He wanted it to look like a professional portrait that had been done of both he and his daughter by famed photographer William Sorenson. Sorenson started his photographic career in Portland Oregon in 1968. He uses an old world masters approach to the portrait session and then applies a handcrafted finish to the final product. He lectures throughout the country and is highly sought after by athletes, politicians and entertainers for his magnificent masterpieces.

So, how to make one that looked like his – interesting challenge!  First, I had to expand the image to the 22×28 size that he wanted, and crop and work on a new original. Second, I had to take part of the background out of the portrait of the daughter (he had taken pictures of both her portrait and his own and sent them to me) and then Photoshop it into the new original.  Finally, once that was done and approved, the task was to digitally paint the portrait, but make sure that it didn’t look TOO painterly and that it mimicked the Sorenson look.

It’s hard to tell from this small of an image that there is any painterly affect at all.  But, there is.  I used a large brush and strokes on the background, then smaller brushes and strokes on the chair, hair and coat, and finally just the smallest of brush strokes for the facial areas.  The final image will be coated, then clear brush strokes will be applied, and it will be stretched and shipped to the client’s framer.  She is going to match the framing material from the other two portraits so that they look like they had been done during the same time-frame and in the same style.  This was a great project!  To see a ‘progression’ image, click here.

Here are the comments from the client:

“Yes, you have indeed achieved what I was looking for. This looks wonderful! I looked through these in some detail, and can see the subtle ways that you’ve made small adjustments. But it still retains the photogenic feeling, so it will match nicely with the other Sorensen photos that will hang side-by-side with it. So the original photo – which we never imagined at the time would turn out so well and is a favorite because it captures personality – has turned into something much improved. Thanks! “

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 1:38 pm. It is filed under Portraits and tagged with digitally painted portrait, painted portrait, portraits, william sorenson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.