Talking about photo paintovers
Being a digital artist striving for a certain level of realism in my work, I’m constantly accused of ‘photo paintovers’.
Those other digital artists out there know exactly what this is, but for those not familiar with the term, allow me to explain: a digital painter (like me) paints, but some digital artists pull apart photos, insert them into their painting and paint over the top of them.
Some artists do this to great effect, and some people ruin artworks this way.
Either way, to be accused of a paintover when you claim you have painted it yourself is quite an enormous insult, as a) it’s suggested that you are not telling the truth about your process and b) people are suggesting you don’t have the skill to paint it yourself.
To show I DO have the skill, I created a walk through of my process and uploaded it to my website some time ago.
Now I’m going to show you something else.
The Opposite of a Paintover!
If it is assumed that you do a paintover to cut corners with reaching realism is characters and objects (I know artists who make lovely multimedia work and DON’T use it for this reason, but we’ll ignore this in this instance and discuss just the digital painter who is trying to take shortcuts), then what is it when you put a bit of painting IN to a photo, having not painted over any photo as a base?
That’s exactly what I did for a competition entry for a design school. We were supposed to express, in 25 words or less, why we wanted to win, and I decided to opt for a visual approach.
The design school assumed it was photography. But it wasn’t.
It’s part photography, part paint.
So this image, here, is part photography, part painting. See if you can pick what I photographed and what I painted:
I’d like to think it isn’t too obvious.
So before I show you the original photo sans painting, I’m going to explain why this is different to a normal paintover – I painted the extras INTO the photo without the aide of a photo to paint over.
This is the opposite of a paintover because a paintover uses a photo segment to enhance a painting. I used painting to enhance a photo.
What does this mean?
Well, as far as I’m concerned, it means I have the skill to at least do a reasonably ok job (the people at the design school were fooled into thinking it was all photo anyway!) painting at that high level of realism.
Meaning I generally have no NEED to pull bits of photos into my paintings – in fact, it’d be slower and harder, trying to fit it in to make it look natural, and as I have demonstrated with this photo above, even when I am doing photography the images tend to fall short of what I want them to be, so they’d be useless to me anyway.
Take the rat in my walk through. How the hell am I going to do a photo paintover for THAT? Do YOU have photos of a hairless, wrinkly purple-grey rat in a bottle?
I paint what I can’t photograph.
If I had to rely on photos for paintover, I’d have much more boring artwork, I can tell you! I certainly wouldn’t have rats in bottles, or grapefruit growing in heart shapes or trees with teeth and eyes eating people.
Where the hell would I even find those photos?
In fact, I couldn’t even find the photo above. I had to manufacture it.
And, it should be noted, I am very honest about this fact – it’s not a photo. It’s a blend. And if I ever bring this technique into my painting, I will be honest about that too. ‘Cause damnit, that was hard work getting the picture above to look right!
It actually took more skill and hard work from me than just sitting down and painting from scratch.
And here’s the original photo that shows exactly why that is:
As you can see, the damned goldfish would NOT look out the front of the glass I had him in. And that’s what I wanted for the picture.
After trying and trying to get him to face the front (shaking his food container, wiggling my finger) I realised there may be a reason goldfish aren’t used much in Hollywood (they take direction very poorly!), and figured the only way I was going to get exactly what I want there was to paint it in.
So my major point with all of this?
I’ve learnt to paint like I do because photos don’t capture what I want them to. If they did, I’d be a photographer.
My painting is much stronger than my photography.
So instead of photo elements as enhancement in my paintings, I’ve actually gone and put painting elements as enhancements in my photos.
Taking photos into my paintings would only slow me down, make things a lot harder, a lot slower and result in a worse painting.
Instead, I’ve made sure I’ve developed my skills as best as I can (and will continue to do so) so as to best represent what I could never capture in a photo anyway.
Tags: art, Art and illustration, Design, Photos, Real discoveries come from chaos, something to think about, work
