Rapid Rose

Rapid Rose, by Mary Stebbins Taitt, click image to view larger.

for Mick Mather.

This is a rapid smudge painting, a digitally altered Photograph. See the original photo here. (The one right before this, for Wordless Wednesday.)

Here is an attempt at a brief tutorial to do this in Photoshop. Choose a photo that is not TOO complex to make into a painting with a large brush. Duplicate the layer. In the second layer, add noise. Add a new layer, label it "paint." (Do all your painting in the "paint" layer.) Choose a large smudge brush. I like to use a ragged brush--I think I used "chalk" for this one. Choose a strength--I used 81%. Strong bushes smear more, weak ones smear less. Choose sample all layers on the top of the smudge. Then on the empty layer, paint rapidly (or slowly and carefully) in the direction of the natural flow. Then with a smaller brush, fill in the spaces you didn't get. You can see where these are by turning off the layers below.

For more texture, use more noise. Also, make an adjustment layer of hue and saturation ABOVE the paint layer (but be sure to paint in the paint layer) and change the hue slightly and the saturation slightly and lower the opacity of the layer. Turn that layer on and off as you paint for more colors. (You can add several of these for slight hue changes as you work). The orange in this painting was added that way.

If you want to actually paint over something, one option is to use the paintbrush set to dissolve and lower the opacity and flow and then paint over with several similar colors and then with the smudge brush to smooth out the little dots--it will match better and look more like a rough painting if you do this. I added the cyan sky that way in this painting. The original sky was white.

Using this technique, you can, if you wish, produce a very rapid painting compared to taking your time and working slowly which usually takes me a month to 6 weeks. Depends on the effect you are after. :-D I'm including this tutorial because I was asked for it.

The rapid technique causes a loss of detail. I added some water droplets back in. It was raining when I took the picture--the droplets on the original were real. I made new ones with two strokes per droplet (approx), using the burn and dodge tools once the layer was painted.