The Art of Painting is something that just doesn't happen without effort and the right tools. One tool I use a great deal is Photoshop to help me plan out  a painting and get the feel of layout.  I'd like to share some of the process I used to get from a video to a painting.

First I took a video of the sunrise and panned the horizon so I would get all three of the mountains I can see from my backyard.

The following are the first, middle and last frames of the video saved as jpgs.  I did this with my movie editing program.

                                           

Next, I stitched the images together in Photoshop to get a complete panoramic photo.



And from there I started painting.  Of course, I modified things a little (or a lot).

The mountains look very small and far away according to  the  camera, where as when you see them in real life, they are much bigger.


When I made them larger, I found that I had to compress the Catalina Mountain Range if I wanted to get all three ranges in. If I didn't, the painting would have been 10 feet long.

As it is, it is 4 feet long by 2 feet high.







When it came to the foreground, I got my handy digital camera out and went down the road a mile to capture pictures of the Santa Cruz River where it flows in several streams.

By my house, the river flows through a deep ditch which isn't very aesthetic, and the reflections are hard to capture.




By adding the river in the foreground, I was able to create a colorful reflection of the sky.

Without that, the whole bottom half of the painting would have been a dull, non-descript space comparable to what you see in the original photograph.






To set the mountains back  in the distance, I added some saguaros.

The minute they were added, you got the sense of the distance and size of the mountains and the beauty of the sky at sunrise.

So there you have it. I went from a video of the sunrise over the Catalina Mountain Range to a complete painting making use of a video camera, a video editing program, Photoshop, a digital camera, a canvas, paints, brushes and imagination.

Hope this has inspired you to be creative with what you and your camera see.

If you would like to purchase a step-by-step DVD demonstrating how to paint clouds, mountains and foreground, go to



Judy Filarecki