As a photographer, I have a natural appreciation for other art forms and have always had a personal affinity for oil paintings. How a person can take a brush to a blank canvas and create an inspirational work of art is really amazing. I’ve never had any formal artistic training, but I can read and I do have an inquisitive nature. Through my readings, I have learned a little about different art styles from the abstracts and impressionists, to pointillism and the realists. I pay attention to these art forms confident that they will, though unsure exactly how, have a positive influence in my own photography.
Recently, I have been using various filters in Photoshop to render my photographs as art pieces influenced by the realist and/or impressionist styles. Now, real artists can find technical differences between my renderings and true realist/impressionist paintings so I just want to qualify that they have been influenced by those styles but I have not necessarily been true to any particular rules. Photoshop CS6 has a great built-in Oil Paint filter that is fairly easy to use and I have applied it to taste until I get a look that I like. While alone it is sufficient to render a great oil painting (e.g., church in a former post), I have also combined it with other filters (texture, blur) to achieve the look in most of the images on this post.
Rendering digital photographs as a form of art has been a lot of fun so I created a template that allows me to drag and drop a photo and turn it into one of the looks you see here. Because I save each of the layers in Photoshop, I can then modify any particular effect to achieve a different look. In a future blogpost, I will take you step-by-step on how the look in these images was achieved and then show you how to save it as your own template so that you too, can enjoy a new art form.
Until next time, good light and keep shooting. — KEVIN
Kevin's Chronicles 