When I am in the middle of painting a series, I sometimes need to use my imagination in another way. I need a break, a creative transition. Doing something completely different takes me away from my current work and becomes a breather from the ideas that I have been working on for weeks.
I took a break recently and began looking at photographs that I had taken in France over the years. Maybe I could paint one of them or abstract them in some way.
One evening in Soréze, I took some photos of the house across the street that I thought looked intriguing. The evening light was lovely and the house was covered with interesting shadows. Maybe this would be one to paint. Here’s the original color photo.
Instead, I decided to do something that I had never done before. I decided to see what I could do playing around with an image on my computer. There are many image-editing software programs that are available to us. Probably the most sophisticated is Photoshop. I tried it before and found the learning curve for me included much more time than I wanted to give. I am a painter.
But I do have an easy-to-use image editing software program called Perfect Photo Suite 8. I use it to re-size my painting images for use on the web.
So I took that photo that I had taken at dusk and decided that it had possibilities. It had shuttered windows, was three stories and had interesting architecture.
Here is the photo after I translated it into something that I thought could possibly pass for a painting.
What do you think? Have you ever tried something like this?