With the TWSA show now over, I have had a few students ask me about some of the paintings in the show and wondering how they were painted. The answer I gave them was that a number of them were painted using photos that were manipulated in a photo editing program like Adobe Photoshop, which is probably the most popular editing program on the
market.
Why would an artist do this you ask.... because it is a way to achieve a different style or look. This is somewhat of an easy way to achieve a different look from the traditional way of painting watercolor. Getting a style that is different from anybody else is what most artists try to achieve to set them apart from others. It is also a way of winning a lot of awards when entering watercolor shows where the jurors like seeing different kinds of styles. Yes,
you still need to learn how to paint in watercolor but if you are just copying a photograph that was generated by an editing program, one just needs to paint it exactly like the photo. That is where a projector comes in handy. Most of the artist that copy a manipulated photo also probably project the image to their paper so they can draw it exactly like the photo.
Many traditional artists that I have talked to say that this is kind of cheating in the creativity
department. How do you feel about this kind of watercolor technique? If this technology was available back in the days when masters like Winslow Homer or John Singer Sargent were painting would they have used it? This has been a very hot topic for many of the groups I am involved with, and since I was a illustrator for most of my professional career I can see both sides of the likes and dislikes of creating this way.
I am not going to answer the question of if this
is or isn't the way to create, because as I mentioned before I believe that there are good and bad parts of creating in this way. I will say that as an artist you should do whatever works for you, too become that fine artist that you so want to be.
Below I have a photo I shot in Vancouver, Canada and I have manipulated the photo in 10 different ways.
All I had to do was apply a filter to the image and adjust it to my liking and the hit OK button to make the
program edit my photo into a filtered photo. Then if I wanted that look in my watercolor I could just trace the image to my paper and paint it to match the style of the photo.
More importantly is to paint paint paint!
David
