Lena and Brooke are painting three panels in the studio to be installed in the retail part of the Raised By Wolves lounge in San Diego. After this base coat of color which will serve as the background for the finished painting, Lena asked me to photograph it in detail before it was lost under many coats of paint. She thought they looked like French impressionist paintings and wanted to preserve the whimsical look. I liked the simplicity but saw the problems of using these images as a final product, since they were not painted with that in mind. After photographing, stitching and correcting the distortion, each of these files is a little over 10 feet high. Below is the end result.
Here are the problems & how I solved them. First, they painted a blue sky background color, but only to the upper part of the canvas. Not only is there a line across the image where the blue ends, but it contaminated the color of the upper part of the painting because it bleeds through the thin paint. The tree trunks transitioning from white to blue is an issue too.
I added the blue from the sky to the bottom half but the result was flat so I added texture mapping, which had the effect of lightening and creating a water like look. I made a mask for the top half of the painting and corrected the colors to match the bottom. The trees had blue sky color coming through them, so I added brush strokes to the trunks. The transition between sky and "ground" is now vastly improved and the color consistent from top to bottom.
This is the image I used to map the texture in the blue, with some added distortion and blurring.
Now I have three impressionistic panels in files that I can print 125”H. . Here are before and after my Photoshop “magic”.
Lena and Brooke are very excited about this new technique and plan to paint lots more in this style in the future.
Happy holidays to all and a prosperous 2018!
