I LOVE painting from life. Unfortunately, that is not always possible so I do use reference photos. Is it the same? Not really. I get way more pleasure out of painting from live subject matter. Tony Ryder and I were discussing painting from life vs. painting from photos a while back and he said, "it is kind of like eating a cheesecake vs. eating a picture of a cheesecake." Couldn't have said it better myself! However, I don't always find it possible to paint from life so I do use reference photos. That being said, I use the photos as reference and don't "copy" them in a slavish fashion. I draw heavily from my experiences on painting and drawing from life to produce a fresh and convincing image with realistic color harmonies. I will come back to this topic in another blog soon.

Today I want to share why and how I enhance my reference photos in Photoshop before I begin painting.

Here is a reference shot I took of a Buffalo Soldier.

Here is the photo after I "doctored" it up a bit.

Now, I could have jumped in and just started painting from the original but I had a very specific mood I wanted to create between the face and the background. Rather than just "winging it", I decided to see if I could get that mood in Photoshop before I even picked up my paint brush.

My method of doing this is really easy and straight forward and is as follows:

1. Create a duplicate Layer

2. Paint that duplicate layer a really bright color (I use florescent green). The reason for this phase is so you can clearly differentiate between the stuff you are clipping and the remaining image.

3. Using my Polygonal Lasso tool, I clipped all around the image revealing the underlying fluorescent green background

4. Using the "Eyedropper" tool, I drew samples from the figure until I found two colors which harmonized well together.

5. Using the "Gradient" tool I created a gradient which seemed to work well with the light on the face.

6. I then switch to the layer the face is on and adjusted the saturation and contrast until it looked right to me.

The reason this is handy is  now try all kinds of color harmonies in the background with just a few clicks of my mouse. A lot of artist work out these problems by doing color studies. There is nothing wrong with that and I really enjoy the "hands on" aspect of that. However, in a crunch, nothing beats Photoshop!

The finished product....

*If you have any questions on this, please feel free to email me at [email protected]*