"Painting"
This tutorial explains one easy technique that can be used for turning an image -- in this case one created with tubes -- into a "painting." You will need Harry the Raver's "Noisy Blur" filter in the free set available from the link above to do the tutorial.
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Step 1 -- The Background Layer Think about the structure of your picture before you start, and roughly what your background will be. I generally end up changing my background, and have done so in this case. The beauty of using layers is that you can go back and do or redo the background at any point. However, you need to start somewhere, and it's always good to work against something like the background you envisage using, so ..... Open a new image, and create a background of your choice. You can use a texture tile, a gradient fill or even just a plain colour to start with, if you like. I wanted an old weathered board wall for my picture. You can get something like my background by following this separate tutorial on how to make weathered planking. |
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Step 2 -- The Lattice Open the Layers Control Panel and create a new layer. When the properties dialog box opens, change the name from Layer 1 to Lattice. (You will be using lots of layers, but this is the only one worth naming.) There are a number of filters you can use to create a fancy lattice framework, including Eye Candy's "Weave." (You can also try my tutorial on weaving, sometime, if you really want to.) However, for the purposes of this tutorial, there is not much point, since the finished "painting" is going to be blurred, and the lattice will largely be covered by other images in any case. Use the line tool, set at a width and colour of your choosing, to draw a few "lattice" struts on the Lattice layer. I have used a brown, with the line tool width set at 10. Holding the shift key down before you start to drag your line will give you a perfectly straight line.
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Step 4 -- Adding Noisy Blur The Noisy Blur filter adds randomly distributed noise to the bottom and right hand sides of your image, like so :
The filter sliders work in strength from left to right, so Effect Strength set at 0 will in fact be the highest possible noise factor, and 255 the least. Random Seed affects the distribution of the noise pixels. Fiddling with them won't affect the outcome all that much on narrow or small images or selections, but makes a big difference on a complete image or large selection. When the filter is applied on a transparent layer, it will use the background colour you have set on your palette for the "noise." So, choose the colour you want the coloured noise to be. I have chosen a lighter shade of the brown I used for the lines.
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Step 4 -- The Other Stuff The trick now is to create a some new layers so that you can add tube images both above and below the lattice, and also to keep things separate and easier to work with. Click on the Background title bar in the Layers Control Panel, then right click and choose "new" to add a layer between the Background and the Lattice layers. Click on the Lattice layer and add a new layer -- this will be above the Lattice layer. You will now have :
Choose a tube, bearing in mind that most tubes come with a built-in black drop shadow. This affects things, since the Noisy Blur filter will pick up the black of the drop shadow and also add noise in the palette background colour, like so :
Take this into account, and experiment a little before settling on the tube you use and your background colour. For this exercise, the black noise caused by the drop shadow is OK :) Because of the nature of this exercise, I found it better to use a single leaf and more uniform colours, so I used a modified version of the JASC SummerLeaves tube -- from which I have extracted the single leaf above and its upside down counterpart. Onwards ...... Dot some leaves around under the lattice, varying their size, then apply the filter. If you like, apply the filter more than once, changing the background palette colour. As is the case when using any filter, you might need to fiddle, doing and undoing a bit, before you arrive at exactly the result you want. The filter will pick up the colours used in the first pass, too. (The best way to see exactly what it does is to use it!) I chose a dull yellow, then a touch of red, followed by some brighter yellow, tuning the sliders to get roughly this effect :
When you are happy with the background leaves, repeat the process (more or less) on the layer above the lattice. To add the flowers (if you choose to use flowers) or butterflies or anything else, add more layers, above and below the leaves, in between the leaves and the lattice and so on. Unless you have a really limited system, there appears to be no restriction as to how many layers you can work with. For this particular image I ending up using 8. The "flower" I have used is in fact my "fireball" tube. I used that because: 1) it was in keeping with the general theme I applied the tube on 3-4 new layers, adding red Noisy Blur to each layer. For greater contrast and depth, I used Colors/Adjust/Gamma Correction to deepen the shades of orange on one or two of the layers.
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Last Stage -- Selective Merging and adding a Butterfly If you are absolutely sure you are happy with your results at any time and want to get rid of the clutter of multiple layers while leaving yourself with the option to change your background, say, you can merge any selected layers at any time : Click on the Layer Visibility toggle -- the little striped box immediately to the right of the title bars on the Layers Control Panel -- to turn off the layers you do NOT want to merge. Choose Layers/Merge/Visible to merge all the remaining layers. After merging, I added and "Noisy Blurred" a JASC butterfly on a new layer above the merged picture. To choose a single butterfly from the JASC butterfly tube, it's easiest of all to open the AButrFly.tub file in PSP, then select and copy/paste the one you want. After merging everything for the last time, I added a final pass of Noisy Blur to the entire picture, with the sliders set to 1,1 and 255. A bit of sharpening (Image/Sharpen) finished things off nicely. |
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