PAINTING BY NUMBERS WITH TUTORIAL TRYOUTS

For Kristin's Tutorial Tryouts this week she gave us the challenge of trying Vicki's approach to painting by numbers, which was quite an easy, relaxed tryout, and a bit of fun.  The pic above is my finished piece.

I decided to use a 'still life' photograph as the basis.  I recently took a thermal image photo of a vase of tulips and I selected a small section of it which I cut down even further to focus on one tulip only.

I fiddled with it a little in Photoshop until I found a version that looked promising for the colors and background.  The tutorial suggested tracing the print by hand with tracing paper from a paper copy, but because time is very short for me at the moment I wanted to find a way to do everything on the computer.

The 'tracing' above was produced by using the 'trace edges' filter on Photoshop.  I like the way sections of the background are like spray painting, but I felt it could be improved. 

Now the picture above looks more like a hand-traced version.  In fact I used an app on my i-pad called Art Rage, which has the facility to place a 'tracing paper' over a photograph so that a 'pencil' from the tools can be used to trace round the shapes.

This was so easy to do, and felt just like tracing on paper, and I was surprised and delighted with the result.  I was so enthusiastic about my tracing that I think perhaps I outlined too many small shapes which was not helpful when I was adding the colours in Photoshop.

At that point I abandoned the idea of using the same colours and instead tried a colour combination that is new for me and am fairly pleased with the result and with the ability to complete the tutorial using the computer.  I like the little touch of a few dashes of digital 'spray paint'.

Interesting and fun to do, and once again I learnt a little something new, so my thanks to Vicki and Kristin.

Sadly this is Kristin's last Tutorial Tryout - for now at least she says.  The Tryouts have been a real challenge to me, and I've learnt a lot, so I hope to see her back with them later in the year.