My concept is to have a figure set up high with a receding landscape behind them. The main feeling I want to convey is introspective and melancholic. The time of day will be dusk to give the image a soft light and high contrast on one side of the figures face. The imagery will be composites of travel photography and portraiture.

The image above In a Strange Land (Proctor D 1919) is

These original image will be montaged to create the final composite, a semi realistic backdrop with a focal portrait in the foreground.

To create the smooth painterly effect on the portrait I have researched these following techniques, a technique that uses high pass and diffuse filters to create the effect (Spooner, 2014). I also looked into a more convention method of dragging the pixels around using painterly brushes (Cornelius, 2015).

For my process I mainly employed the mixer brush tool, I liked the way it dragged the colours along but kept the sharpness, so you would get elements of the texture brush like the bristles left at the edges of the stroke. I used a variety of brushes over the image and at the end went over select areas again with the blur tool to soften out some of the sharpness of the mixer brush.

Issues I faced were the preset brushes ended up creating the same stroke pattern over the entire image, in a real painting the artist would use different sized brushes and the angle they paint with would change, varying the stroke impression. To counter this problem I changed the size shape and angle of the brush within photoshop to help give a sense of variance to the mark making. Another problem was marrying all the imagery together, the photos that comprise the image were taken in different locations and different lighting conditions. The best way to counter this issue was to adjust the temperature of the images, pushing them all towards either a warm spectrum. Also I subtly merged the edges of the cut and pasted imagery, as in a real painting the colours would blur and seep into each other as with any wet medium. To cap it off I layered an oil paint texture to the image with a blending mode to cement everything together.

This project taught me to get information from any place available and to pick out the best pieces of knowledge and techniques that resource offers. Many tutorial will focus on a particular tool or feature and since the easily accessible tutes are free many are not too in depth. One page in particular had a terrible layout and the final completed image did not look great, but from this tutorial I learn about the mixer brush tool which I used for a lot of my project. It operated similar to the smudge tool as it dragged pixels across the page but it had more options you could tweak such as wetness, load and mix settings and would hold colour from the previous location and mix it with the colour it next interacted with, helping to achieve that blended paint look. I also began to use the textured brushes, these gave a great painterly effect as they left what looked like bristle strokes at the edges that could look sharp, or if blended over from different angles started to get a soft layered effect.