Digital Painting

Artist Statement

For this project, we chose a high-quality photo of our choice to recreate in photoshop. We uploaded our photos and created a separate layer for the image. Next, I used the dropper tool on the sidebar to color-match everything, outline the shapes in each section as accurately as possible onto the transparent drawing layer, and use the paint bucket tool to fill it in. I wanted to do something a bit challenging, but also wanted to stick with the original ‘selfie’ theme, so I decided to do a photo of my grandfather holding me as a baby during the Fourth of July parade. I chose this photo because it had a decent range of colors, lines, and textures like skin and hair that were challenging to replicate. This photo is also very meaningful to me because my grandfather was a very important figure in my life growing up. He lived in Portland Maine and was always around to help raise me and my brother. He passed away this summer, so I was determined to re-make the picture in order to bring an old memory back to life, remember him, and have a little keepsake that I can look back upon. I feel this photo really showcased who he was as a person and his caring nature, so I wanted to showcase and share that.

Because we were working digitally, the only materials used were the various features available to us on photoshop that we could play around with, like dropper, paint bucket tools, and different sizes and opacities for the brush and eraser tools. I replicated a varsity of different colors that were found in the original picture, the most common being shades of pink, black, brown, blue, and white and light skin tones that I incorporated together to create dimension and value. I added a forest green background because it contrasted nicely with the rest of the image.

I used a few different processes while creating my final work. I went through many revision processes where I had to go back in after I was finished and fill in the white space, or go back and erase and re-draw certain areas where my facial features blended in and were not detailed enough. Because this project was very time-consuming, I was not able to add the anchors on my shirt or the stripes and leaves on my grandfather's shirt. As a result, I had to completely color over the areas with a base color, and paint other colors in various shades on top to add dimension so it wouldn’t look flat. Finally, I also experimented with the background colors. Before altering it, I had attempted drawing the same background that was in the original photo, but felt it took away from the rest of the drawing. I decided instead to play around with a few solid colors. had wanted something light, like a pastel blue or a yellow, but found the darker green, one of my grandfather's favorite colors, created more meaning and emphasis to the forms in the photo.