Art

Boy In Shades

Stylized Portrait

Today as promised, I’m sharing another of my artworks. “Boy In Shades” is a stylized portrait of my then six year old son. I took the photo used for this portrait on the afternoon of Easter Sunday in 2010.

The digital drawing below was created using a photo I took of my son enjoying the discovery of an Easter egg in my parents’ backyard. The reason for that expression on his face is the realization that he and his cousin had passed and searched that very spot several times and missed that bright orange egg in the green grass. When he finally found it, he looked at me with that “Doy!” expression on his face. And, I dutifully captured the moment in the photo.

A drawing of the artist’s son, created from photo by the artist,
in Adobe Photoshop, 22 June 2019, by D. Denise Dianaty.

To create the drawing, I screen captured that part of the image from the raw photo in my Mac Photos application. Then, I copied it into a new image in the Adobe Photoshop application. In a series of new layers, I traced elements of the drawing over the background layer of the image. Hiding the background layer, I created a new background layer with the flourishes and the provenance text. When the whole of the drawing was the way I wanted it to appear, I flattened the image.

For comparison, I’ve shared a collage/banner of the major steps in my process below.