Precious
2003
This image is based on a photograph that I took of Lisa Evans and her daughter Quinn. There was something so special about the tender loving moment that Lisa created with Quinn. In all my portraits, whether painted from scratch or based on photographs, I strive to express passion and feeling. This image spoke strongly to me and I followed that feeling in working on it.
This picture won the People's Choice Best of Show at the Northern California Professional Photographers meeting in February, 2003.
The original photograph, shown below, was taken with a Fujifilm A303 3.2 Megapixel camera.
I opened the photograph in Corel Painter on a Macontish PowerBook G4 Titanium using a Wacom Intuos2 6x8 tablet, made a clone copy and then painted over the duplicate image using a variety of brushes. Initially I cloned the color from the original photo, and then I started adding color. The original photo was rather cool with a blue-gray cast and a limited tonal range. With my brush strokes I added a greater variety of warmer, more saturated colors, especially in the hair, and also increased the tonal contrasts in selected places. Besides adding color I also smeared and blended the image, especially at the edge. I then printed the image on Epson Velvet Fine Art paper using the Epson 2200 inkjet printer with Ultrachrome pigment inks.