Karen Sperling’s Blog

Painting by Karen Sperling from a photo by Evan Agostini.

One of the things that intrigues me about creating paintings is that I like artistic problem solving.
Some people do crossword puzzles, I devise painting techniques.
There’s something grand about the sweet victory of unravelling an artistic mystery.
One such conundrum was how to paint a portrait with a textured background for a chapter in my book, Painting for Photographers.
I wanted a background in the style of the great masters like Rembrandt and John Singer Sargent, and I wanted to show clearly defined brush strokes.
The background effects that I was going to develop would be special, which meant the person in the foreground would need to be strong enough to justify the elaborate background.
That was the first problem: Who would be a forceful enough presence to counterbalance an inventive background?
The answer was, a celebrity.
Not having any appropriate photos of famous people, I searched the internet for a suitable photo, which in itself became an interesting problem to solve.
Who to choose? And if I found a photo I wanted to paint, would I get permission to use the photo?
I came across this photo of Oprah, which I thought was one of the best I’d seen of her, and a painting of Oprah would justify the elaborate background I had in mind.
The photo had a byline, Evan Agostini, who I found on Facebook, also through an internet search.
I requested permission to use the photo and he agreed. First problem solved!
By the way, this happened just before the Shepard Fairey image of Obama came out and the subsequent coverage and questions about Fairey using the source photo illegally.
It never occurred to me not to ask permission to use the source photo for my painting of Oprah.
Once I had solved the problem of which photo to use, the question then became, which software program to paint with, and then, which brushes and settings inside the software programs to use.
I experimented with a lot of different brushes and customized settings in Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop, and wound up using mostly Painter to achieve the result in the painting.
I used a “scrap” image, where I just played around with textures and brush strokes with various brushes on various settings, looking for clues to solve the artistic mystery.
The chapter in the book describes the brushes and techniques that I used to create the portrait, seen above.
What my tutorials don’t show you are all the experiments I do. They only show the things that work!
Here’s a look at all the experiments I did for the Oprah background before I arrived at the one that’s included in the book.

I experimented with colors and tones in addition to brushes and settings to get the look of a Rembrandt/Sargent background with brush strokes.
When I found the looks I liked, I then painted the actual image, solving the artistic mystery of how to paint a portrait with a textured background.
Case closed!
People always ask me, how do you know when a painting is done?
The answer is, when you no longer have any problems to solve!
For more information about Painting for Photographers, click here.

Tags: Painting for Photographers book (Corel Painter) //