This isn’t entirely about the art nor is it about the techniques and software that created it. This post is just a little bit about the way it came about and my impressions of how it got there.

I’ve been a pencil sketcher from long ago. Eventually, pens, charcoal, pastels, took over. Those eventually gave way to painting with oil on canvas using brushes, knives, and airbrush. So, yes, I have a background in painting as well as drawing and illustration. I love them all – I can’t pick favorites. The day I discovered what a Koala Pad and an Apple IIe computer could do for computer graphics still sounds of the echoes of angelic choir in my monkey-touches-the-monolith moments of my artistic life.

So, you can imagine my thrill at the new Adobe CS5 version of Photoshop. It’s probably the best Photoshop I’ve ever used and I’ve been pushing pixels with this software since version 3.5… which was around 1994. I was a published artist at 12 and that was some years ago and I’ve gone round and round with different tools, mediums, and techniques. Trust me, I’m not easy to impress these days with new-fangled artistic goodies because I’ve had lots of disappointments but only a few contenders that could replace my beloved pencil or oil paints. Adobe’s Photoshop and a good Wacom graphic tablet have been some of the high points among my artistic tools.

I’m happy to say that Adobe’s CS5 has a lot going for it. One of those things is a new brush engine (which I have strong suspicions was purchased from Corel (Painter software). I can’t prove it but since I’ve used Painter X I can honestly say I immediately felt similarities.

This new brush engine allows an artist to take any piece of art and “brush” it as if it were just a canvas full of wet paint to create a painterly effect using only the existing pixels on the page. In other words – one could take a rather ho-hum photo and turn it into something much prettier.

Below is a photo of cacti planted at my Father in Law’s place in the Sonoran Desert. It’s a shame – the location and cacti are beautiful and stunning… my little iPhone 3G photo isn’t.

However, after firing up the Wacom tablet and driving the new Adobe CS5 Photoshop software all over that rather drab photo I was able to achieve a much improved, painted rendition of that photo (see zoomed enlargement). It’s not perfect but it’s a step forward in taking a dull photo and giving it some kind of life – even if no longer a straight image capture as much as a “painted” version of the same scene. It even looks nice framed.

A little work here and there adjusting colors, luminosity, texture, levels, and all that made it pop and achieve much more character and interest in its life as a “painting” than it ever would have as a photo. That works for me.