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Creative Art
Adobe Photoshop Painting: “Ramshackle Farmhouse”
Digital Art Creation
When I was working as a graphic designer, I was a grad-school trained Photoshop expert. I’ve always enjoyed working in Adobe Photoshop — on a Mac, naturally. Illustrator is great too. But, even when I create something in Illustrator, I still turn to Photoshop to finesse the final product. For that matter, I use the software to finesse all my images before sharing them, even images with treatments from other software applications.
One of my skills in the Adobe software is creating whole, original works of art. They might be stylized artwork, like “Boy In Shades” or drawings of my own, enhanced in Photoshop or other image editing software, such as “Monsters… Monsters Everywhere.” Or, as with my digital painting of “Ramshackle Farmhouse” (featured in this post), the work may be recreating a photograph.
The project took several days and over a hundred hours to complete. This is why even original digital artwork is expensive. If I were paid minimum wage for the hours I put into this piece, it would easily exceed $800. Imagine the time and materials that go into an oil or acrylic painting, or a watercolor. But, artists’ time and material outlay is not factored into whatever price at which we may be able to sell our work.
Sharing the creation of my art as it progressed
One of the keys to this kind of artwork is Photoshop’s layers. Keeping each segment in a layer to itself throughout the process allows flexibility. It lets you go back and edit or change things as needed in one part of the image without risking other parts. It also helps the placement of details within the final image, such as what is in the foreground versus the background, etc.
I began the process of creating this complex art piece by choosing the part of the original photo I wanted to draw in Adobe Photoshop. To start, I settled on a color palette. I’ve found, in this type of “painting” that it is best to stick to a limited palette. All the colors in the piece are derived from the three color swatches below.
