For homework, design and paint a similar still life, with the following guidelines:




1. All Hard-body objects (glass, metal, plastic...)

2. single light source

3. Spend no more than 3 hours on it.

4. paint in color


5. bring a photo of your scene.

week01

essential hotkeys:

 B= brush

e= eraser

space= pan

Z = ZOOM

tab = turn off menus

Alt = eyedroper

x= exchange colors

[ ] = brush size

[shift] b - mixer brush

week 8

Thumbnail progress

For next week, please being in presentable, color thumbnails and your photo reference library. All line work should be gone for this version.

Assignment.. carefully add photographic detail to an oil painting.

Images can be downloaded here.

Be sure to keep it subtle. It can be very easy to over-do it.
When I am extracting photo elements, I like to pull info from the most contrasty channel to use as the basis of a mask.
1. On your photo fragment, look through the R, G, and B channels. Find the one which offers the most contrast on the area you want to extract.
2. copy and paste that area to the layer mask. (Alt-click on layer mask to show it full screen first)
3. Adjust brightness and contrast to maximize the area you want.
4. If additional cleanup or masking is needed, apply it to the layer mask with a brush.

Here are some videos showing how to extract photos using a luminance key.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSNiRsWzq-c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPszOHLmSws

Masking can also be done using roto splines or painting a mask manually.

Also for next week, continue to develop thumbnails and bring in a folder of  photo research. 

The task is to paint-in the missing parts by hand. The eyedropper is allowed, but the clone tool is not.
The final image should be viewed from three feet away, so paint to that context.

Images are available here.

Also for next week, bring in 2-3 very simple thumbnails toward the final project. Pencil on paper is fine.

self portraits

For homework this week: Paint a person or animal from life.   Do not use photos, webcams, or phones.  The one exception is, once you have started a painting from a live subject for about an hour, you may take a picture to continue the painting later on. Preferably, the entire process should be done from life.

The goal is to create a side-by-side copy of one of the provided classical oil paintings. They can be downloaded here.



For your first attempt, you may use the eyedropper tool to sample colors from the original, although the ultimate goal will be to match the palette by eye, and you may try that if you are feeling adventurous.