How to take a bad picture and turn into into a wonderful painting / collage.
I am a bit of a photography buff. I love to take pictures. I also love to create collages with my favorite photos. Combining your painting skills and digital photography skills can produce a really nice piece of art.
Let me caution, though, never use other people’s photos for your art. Not only does it violate the owner of the photo’s rights, you would also be using something that you didn’t create. Your art wouldn’t be totally yours if you used someone else’s work. It’s kinda shifty.
Some say using photos in art is cheating. I say sure it is, if your using just an average beauty shot. When you take crappy photos and turn them into beauty, then that is totally acceptable because you are stretching the boundaries of your creativity.
Let’s take a look at how to create your own collage painting.
First, pick the picture. For my collage I picked this picture of my oldest daughter. Yah, a really bad photo. But like everything in art, it has possibilities.
With this pic, I took a while to crop it mentally, to try to imagine what she might be doing if I put her in a different setting. Then, I really did crop it. As you can see here, I faded the edges of the cropped image, then I made it somewhat opaque with my photo editor.
At this point you could either print out the image and apply it to your canvas, or you can apply it to a digital canvas such as Photoshop or Corel. For simplicity I used Corel.
Here, you see that I basically laid in my colors around the photo.
Next, here, I started painting over the picture, and adding details to the painting around it. I didn’t leave any of the original picture untouched. I added deep shadows to the chin area, added more color and shadow to the hair, etc.
This step has a bunch of changes. I added a lot of detail to the background and to the reflection in the water.
This is my finished collage. By now the photo should look less like a photo stuck on a canvas and more like part of the piece as a whole. Notice how I added to the picture by changing almost everything about it.
Notice also how I didn’t go for photo realism in the painting. If I had I think it would have cheapened the whole piece. If realism had been my goal I could have strapped some wings on my daughter, plopped her in our frog pond, and snapped a few shots. I don’t think it would have come up with the same dreamy effect I was going for.
So, go sort through your really bad photos and turn them into something from your imagination.
