Although I haven't been painting, I have been busy taking care of office work, entering competitions, matting and framing work and getting ready for teaching my Advanced Watercolor Portrait workshop in Gualala next week. One of the topics is how to change the lighting on the image. Ideally, you have a sculpture head that you can light in different ways to see how the light falls on the different features. There was a small plaster cast available through the Utrecht catalogue awhile back but I missed the window of opportunity to purchase it. Now I can't find anything suitable. I usually just keep a clip file of interesting lighting situations on various heads and work from that. Tonight I was playing around with Photoshop Elements and discovered a tool called "Smudgestick" under filters/artistic. I had never bothered with that one before. Turns out it alters the light pattern on the image! I have included a photograph of mine. The top image I reduced the light on the face just slightly. The bottom image I removed most of the shadow on the face.
I will be sitting out at the Gallery Concord tomorrow working on my example of various expressions for the workshop. Stop by and check it out if you find yourself in the neighborhood.
1 comment:
In the full version of Photoshop there is a feature called spotlight which allows you to move the spotlight around to different parts of the image giving shadows on different sides of the face. It is even in some of the early versions of Photoshop.
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