All Things Painter The Interpreted Portrait by John Derry

Capitalizing on a combination of digital photography and Natural-Media® brushes in Corel® Painter™, photographers are now taking advantage of a new art form: the interpreted portrait.

Photography—both traditional and digital—is composed of three primary areas: subject acquisition, processing, and printing. Each of these areas of specialization requires a unique set of skills. In the traditional photographic model, a photographer performs the image acquisition, and a photo lab handles the processing and printing aspects. In the new digital photography model, these three areas are now increasingly being performed by the photographer, who can use tools such as Corel® Paint Shop Pro® X to correct color and remove distractions, and can print large-scale images on color-managed, archival-quality, wide-format inkjet printers.

This new model goes even further in that the photographer can use brush strokes in Corel Painter to transform the appearance of a photograph into that of a painting. The image is then printed on either canvas or watercolor paper to further enhance the effect. The result combines the best of the photographic portrait with the handpainted oil or watercolor painting.

In fact, the photographic eye closely matches that of the traditional painter. Portrait photographers have long emulated styles found in traditional painting genres—the lighting of a Rembrandt or the pose of a Sargent, for example. Composition, lighting, and color are essential to the vocabularies of both photography and painting. This shared expertise provides photographers with excellent base skills if they decide to include the interpreted portrait in their product offerings.

If you want your work to have both energy and focus, you need to invest time to master the skill of hand-applied brushwork. In a portrait, the subject's inner emotion and character are the ultimate intent of the painting, and the artist contributes to the overall expression through the choice of pose and lighting, as well as the painted interpretation. The brush strokes, however, should never detract from the portrait subject. Although Corel Painter possesses a wide variety of cloning tools that you can use to automatically apply brush strokes to an image, I do not recommend that you rely solely on this technique. The result is often too mechanical in and of itself. For example, cloning tools should be used sparingly in nonessential background areas.

If you are interested in incorporating interpreted portraiture into your photographic work, you can begin by trying out the free downloadable Corel Painter IX.5 Trial. To fully appreciate how Corel Painter emulates traditional art media, you'll need a Wacom® pressure-sensitive tablet. Consider receiving some training from one of the many recognized Corel Painter experts.

It takes time and patience to master expressive hand-rendered portraiture. Some photographers find the interpreted portrait a creative extension of their work. Others collaborate with an experienced artist to render the interpretation. Either way, you can explore ways to incorporate this new art form into your list of product offerings.

The digitally driven confluence of photography and painting offers a brave new world. Take advantage of it!

John Derry
Somewhere in Kansas

John Derry is a pioneer of digital painting and one of the original authors of Corel® Painter™. Since 1985, he has leveraged his background in drawing and painting to advance the look and experience of traditional art-making tools on the computer. John has a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in Fine Art and is a practicing artist and photographer. He teaches Corel Painter workshops around the country and is currently serving as Corel's Painter Ambassador-at-Large. John's Web site is at www.pixlart.com.