The Red Truck By The Barn

I pass this wonderful old barn every time I drive up to our cabin, and on this particular day the combination of the light and shadow, the graceful branches of the bare trees, the texture-y wood of the barn, and of course that fabulous red truck all caught my attention.  When the angle of the light is right, photographers can get a little crazy …

… I managed to pull over (successfully ignoring the giant 18-wheelers whooshing past) and get a few snaps without being turned into a pancake.

Although this image has been treated to a lot of digital “painting” in Corel Painter 2015 recently, it was originally a photograph, taken with the Nikon D40x and the 18-200mm vr Nikkor lens in January of 2009 and given some adjustments with Photomatix ‘s hdr. Obviously, this is one of those images that I’ve held onto for a long time, and finally decided this version was ready to let see the light of day.

I’m having a tremendous amount of fun (and that’s what it’s really all about, isn’t it?) with the photo painting technique.  The fabulous tutorials, brushes and textures from Karen Burns of Digital Paint Works, who I referenced in my previous blog post, have been a tremendous help.

I’ve been photo-painting since about 2010, when I added my first painted-photo image to my website.  But back then, my computer wasn’t really rugged enough to handle Corel Painter 11 easily.  When I got my new MacBook Pro in January of 2014 I gradually started using the program again, and was beginning to get back into the swing of it, when Santa brought me Corel Painter 2015 for Christmas last year.  Having heard so much about all the great new brushes, I was very excited.  However, as so often happens, The Universe (or The Gremlins) had other plans.  Not a clue what I was doing wrong, but for some reason many of the brushes just wouldn’t work, or they’d work then just up and quit.  I have to say, I’m not having any of those problems with Karen Burns’ wonderful brushes.

I strongly recommend anyone who might be interested in this technique to visit Karen’s website.  Loads of fun to work along with her via the tutorials.  She not only includes the brushes and textures, she even supplies the (copyrighted) practice images.

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As always, great to have you drop by.  A click on the image above will take you to my website where it can be viewed at a much nicer resolution and much less nasty watermark.