Portrait Strategies

[Synthetik]

I often get asked by beginning Studio Artist users how to create portrait style paintings, what preset to use, how to make the image more recognizable, etc. There's a discussion going on in the forum about this right now, so i thought i'd add a link to the responses here since that post will vanish into obscurity at some point but people might still be coming to this group as a learning resource. There are a few downloadable paint action sequences in the forum discussion that highlight some different approaches to building a PASeq that will paint a portrait. There is an older studio artist blog entry that includes a set of Studio Artist 3.5 PASeq presets specifically designed for portraits as well as some hints on the techniques used to build the PASeqs. You can find the article and downloadable preset collection here. The Studio Artist User Guide pdf includes a short discussion on 'Designing a Paint Strategy' on page 400. Think of a Paint Strategy as your road map for applying different presets or preset adjustments to create your final aesthetic image. It could be as simple as reducing the brush size and path length of your paint strokes over time so that you start by roughing in large color areas and finish up adding fine details to your painting. Or it could be simulating the application of different natural media techniques that work together to create the final visual appearance of your painting. So you might be using a watercolor preset for your color rendition and a fine black pen or pencil preset to accentuate edge detail in the final painting. The idea is to try and think about how an artist would combine together different brushes, techniques, or media types to build a final painting. Studio Artist 3.5 offers a few paint synthesizer macro edit menu options under the main edit menu to help you quickly edit an existing paint preset. You can make it clone color from the source image as opposed to dragging color. You can make it edge or color area focus. You can turn the automask paint nib feature on. All of these options can help fine tune a paint preset to give a more detailed rendition of the source image, which is often the goal in portrait painting strategies.