Digital painting nudes from photographs

Painting Nudes -painter essentials 5

Editing

Painter Essentials 5 Auto Paint

For the last few months I’ve been tinkering with painting nudes in Painter Essentials 5. The auto paint setting is fairly easy to use when photo painting nudes but it wasn’t producing the results I wanted.

There then followed a lot of painting, layer blending, erasing and quite a lot of cursing to achieve a better result.

photo painting nudes

See some of the first results using just the auto painter in Photo Painting Nudes – first attempt and Photo painting nudes experiments

I have been achieving some interesting results blending black and white and colour layers together using Overlay or Soft Light settings in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. This image combines that process with layers created in Painter Essentials.

The idea was to create an  image where the main figure retained some elements of photographic realism whilst the background was rendered as a sketch or painting. 


The first task was to get rid of the unwanted ‘stuff’ in the background. I selected and deleted the main elements. The selection was then tidied up using the eraser. The image has been blended with a black and white layer. The saturation can still easily be changed by altering the layer density of the black and white.

I then  created a pencil sketch from the edited image. I only wanted the pencil texture to appear on the wood so I then erased the figure. This was saved as a Painter Rif  file and as a Jpeg. I always save my work in progress as Photoshop psd, Paintshop psp or Painter rif files as I am forever going back to change things.


I then did the same thing with the pen and ink auto paint setting. This had to be run several times. 

I then created a pastel painting using the techniques described in my previous post

Blending the final nude in photoshop

The last job was to open all the Jpegs and the original image in Paintshop Pro. I created a duplicate layer of the original in black and white and copied and pasted the painting and sketches as layers into the original. I then spent a happy hour or so experimenting with normal, overlay and soft light blend modes and adjusting the layer densities to achieve the final result.


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