Experiments with digital painting...

  I am always looking for a way to add more detail to my mixed media collage art. I recently discovered a program online that converts your digital photos to color sketches, oil pastel drawings or oil paintings with surprisingly beautiful results.

Here is a recent picture of the last of the moms in my garden...I imported it into the Fotosketcher program, (a free download online) and after a bit of trial and error, converted it to this...

I love the softening of the edges and the look of the brushstrokes. I think this will be a better element in the collage I am working on. Here is another, the line of poplar trees in my yard...

and the more painterly version...

   which I think will make a perfect background to another collage. The program has more trouble with portraits of people, you have to play with the settings a lot more. I am not sure why landscapes and objects convert so much better. Perhaps because trees and flowers can be suggested to the eye and you still see trees and flowers, where as people are more about recognizable features? 

   Part of me wonders if this is cheating, not hand drawing or painting these elements. But then perhaps not, after all, it is my own photograph, and my work in the program to convert it, and, in fact, I actually grew the trees and the mums! So how much more "mine" can it be? So I am thinking of a whole lot of wonderful pictures I have taken over the years, and how they can be revisited, and looked at in a new light. Go ahead, give it a try, you may be surprised at the result! Enjoy... 

The free Fotosketcher program can be downloaded here: 

http://fotosketcher.en.softonic.com/