Photoshop Digital Painting 

With this piece of artwork, I was trying to active detailed work while using a medium new to me. The first time I used Photoshop on my laptop I was cleaning up the lines for the Logo Design project, a task that was relatively simple. This project was far more complicated and detail oriented so I quickly switched over to using Photoshop on my iPad with a stylist. Even though the program on my iPad was easier to use I still had to learn a variety of tools to make this piece. The most useful tools I learned to use were layers and opacity. The layer tool gave me a lot of flexibility, I was able to put every piece of myself on one or multiple different layers.  Hair, face, neck, clothing, and every piece in the background are all on different layers. I turned down the opacity on the original photo to prevent having open spaces between the color blacks, a great feature that photoshop has Is that I was still able to pick up the right color with the eyedrop tool. Overall I like that I was able to get the level of detail that I wanted. 

The specific material that I used for this project is the program Photoshop. I downloaded the program onto my school laptop and my personal iPad for free using my school account. Personally, I don't like Photoshop as much as the program I usually use, Procreate.  That might be because I am not as well versed in Photoshop, but it's definitely a harder tool to learn the Procreate. Despite this, I enjoyed learning the program and messing around with the different tools and options. When making this piece I was using an apple pencil with the iPad, this was useful because the pressure sensitivity allowed me a lot of control with line weight and it's overall a good tool to use on a screen.   

The first decision I made when making this piece was choosing a photo to use. I choose the one I did because I liked the look and color of golden hour, I thought the splash of orange tones across the side of my hair would look nice in a digital rendition. I decided to use a relatively small brush size because I wanted to make the piece as realistic as possible and was willing to put a lot of time into it to do so. Other than using small color chunks to create detail I also used different shapes in different places. On my face, I drew the blocks in the directions of my skin, for example, the colors under and over my eyes go in an arched direction around them. The colors in my hair are long and narrow and the colors that make up my shirt go with the folds. For the background I decided to use relatively simple shapes to keep the focus on the subject, despite this I did put a lot of detail into the windows of the L.L.Bean building because it looked incomplete without it and the focus is still near the face.