Photoshop Painting

At first, I was planning on using a self portrait, but I ended up "painting" a picture of eggplants. As soon as I realized I did not need to use a self portrait, I knew I wanted to use an image of something from nature, whether this was a landscape or a single flower. I chose the eggplants because I liked the colors and the lighting, and it was a fun photo in my camera roll. I wasn't entirely sure what the end result would be, but I knew I wanted as much detail as possible—I wanted realistic eggplants.

I gradually shaded in the entire image, working in very small sections. I used the eyedropper tool to match colors, and the paint bucket and paintbrush tools to fill in the sections. After I had roughly colored the entire image, I made the background photo (layer 1) invisible, and used the paintbrush tool to fill in major gaps. I wanted a great amount of detail, and to avoid losing color and shadow I worked with very small segments.

Overall, it was very satisfying to zoom out and see a complete and recognizable image. I was always working on small sections, and rarely saw the whole picture. I had issues with saving my document, and lost quite a bit of my progress, which was frustrating. However, in the end, I had a result that I was very happy with. It was interesting to see things like shadow and depth once I had completed the whole image. While it was impossible to see these qualities when I was zoomed in working, they became clear once I saw the final product.