ince the earliest beginnings of art, the portrait has been one of its most popular forms. The oldest surviving examples, dating from early Egyptian, through Greek and Roman times and into the first millennium, often feature deities or idealised heroic subjects. Although the ravages of time and climate have left their mark, the examples which survive bear testimony to the skills of the earliest portrait painters.

While the religious influence remained strong into the Middle Ages, the range of subjects broadened to include noblemen and wealthy merchants, members of their families or other chosen subjects. The reason for this is twofold; firstly because over the centuries very few gifted artists were financially independent and they were therefore obliged to seek financial sponsorship from wealthy patrons; secondly because, in exchange for their patronage, these noblemen and merchants would often require the artist to paint their portraits in order to satisfy their own vanity.

Portrait painting over the centuries has, of course, evolved and developed like other forms of art, reflecting the changing moods of the centuries in which they were created, the different styles of the artists and the use of different materials and techniques as these evolved. As well as creating a fascinating visual record of our early ancestors, these portraits form a priceless archive of the anthropological development of the various ethnic lines traced by man’s rapid evolution during the last few thousand years.

Figure 6.1 Although relativelycrudein execution, these earliest ofportraits have powerful visual impact, with imaginative use of the limited colours then available

Figure 6.2 Many early works conveyreligious themes. These were ofien commissioned fordisplayin churches and cathedrals

Figure 6.3 As the portrait developed as an art form, so did the skill of the portrait artist in rendering the subtleties of bone structure, skin tone and shade

Figure 6.4 Many early portraits were commissioned by wealthy merchants, noblemen or church dignitaries

In the realm of portrait painting, the digital artist has a wide range of possibilities, starting from the most basic line art construction (Figure 6.5) created within a drawing application, using a combination of line, curve and shape tools. Closed vector shapes can be given simple colour fills (Figure 6.6) or more exotic gradient, texture or pattern fills. Quite powerful results can be achieved with the use of such basic tools to produce shaded or hand rendered effects (Figure 6.7).

Figure 6.5 Basic line drawing

Figure 6.6 Colour enhancement using a vector fill tool

Figure 6.7 Vector drawn portraits can be given depth through the use of fills, hand rendered effects or shading

Drawing application blend tools also provide the possibility of more subtle effects, as shown in the example in Figure 6.8; here, the blend tool has been used to create a smooth shading to the cheeks and to the eyelids of the face, producing much more impact to the finished result than could be achieved with simple flat fills.

Figure 6.8 Enhancement of a vector portrait using blends. The final result (a) is shown broken down into its shape elements (b) and (c). (d) shows how the shading of the cheeks and the eyelids was achieved by using two 10 step blends between shapes filled with solid colour

Some drawing applications, such as Macromedia Freehand, also offer the option of using a stylus and tablet to use drawing tools in a pressure sensitive mode, so that lines of variable stroke can be drawn as the designer varies the pressure of the stylus.

Portraits created in a drawing application have the advantage that individual lines and shapes can be easily selected for editing. Such drawings are fully scalable without loss of definition and they print well even on relatively low resolution printers. Although simple in construction, they can have strong visual impact and make excellent posters.

Another approach is to exploit the editability of a drawing application to create the basic features of the portrait and then to import the result into a painting application, where it becomes transformed into a bitmap for further enhancement.

Using a combination of the precision drawing tools offered by applications like Freehand, Illustrator, CorelDRAW or Designer, together with the glittering array of brush styles and painting techniques offered by the leading bitmap painting application Fractal Painter, there are few traditional portrait styles which cannot be emulated by the skilled digital designer or artist. However, while reproducing such styles represents an interesting technical challenge, the exciting thing about the digital medium is that it offers the opportunity to create unique and striking effects which would be difficult if not impossible using traditional methods. The aim of this chapter is to explore just a few of these effects in the examples which follow.

Tonal Control Effects

Interesting results can be obtained by using the tonal controls available in Photoshop or Painter. Figure 6.9 shows, for example, the use of Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation/Colorize controls to create a sepia image and the effect of changing the mode of a cutout of the image to Black and White and applying the Diffusion Dither option.

Figure 6.9 Colorising an original (a) to create a sepia effect (b) and using Diffusion Dither to create a hand rendered effect (c)

Other tonal controls which can produce dramatic changes in the appearance of an image are Threshold and Curves. After placing the image (a) in Figure 6.10 in Photoshop, Image/Map/Threshold was selected, opening the dialog box in (d). The effect of Threshold, as the name implies, is to convert all the pixels in an image either to black or to white, depending on which side of a greyscale threshold they fall. By adjusting the slider in the dialog box, the threshold setting giving the optimum contrast effect can be chosen (b). To produce the variant shown in (c), image (a) was duplicated and Image/Adjust/Curves was selected, opening the dialog box in (e). The x‑axis of the graph represents the brightness values of the pixels in the original image; the y‑axis represents the new brightness values. The default diagonal line shows the starting relationship between the input and output values, with no pixels mapped to new values. Manipulating the shape of the curve in the dialog box causes selective changes in brightness, producing the solarised result shown in (c).

Figure 6.10 Applying threshold to an original image (a) to create a bold, black and white contrast (b) and using Curves to create a dramatic solarised effect (c)

The posterisation technique – so-called because it produces an image using very few colours, or tints of the same colour, in the style of early silk‑screened publicity posters ‑ can produce some interesting portrait effects. The Posterise command in painting applications allows the user to specify the number of tonal levels (or brightness values) for an image and then maps pixels to the level that is the closest match. In the example shown below (Figure 6.11), a 3 level posterisation was applied to the image in (a) in Photoshop to produce the result in (b), a 3 level posterisation offering a maximum of ten colours, compared with the millions of colours in the RGB original. To simplify the result even further, Photoshop’s Dust & Scratches filter was applied to image (b) to produce image (c). Although the normal purpose of this filter is to remove defects from scanned photographic images, it was used in this case to remove the graininess of the posterised image. Such an image can easily be traced in a drawing application, where it can be scaled, without loss of resolution, for silkscreen printing. The same applies to the greyscale example in (d).

Figure 6.11 Posterising a colourimage: (a) orignal, (b) 3 level posterisation, (c) after applying Dust & Scratches filter and (d) after conversion to greyscale; (e) and (f) show the Posterize and Dust & Scratches dialog boxes respectively

Painting Styles

Starting with a photograph or original portrait painting, Fractal Painter offers a wide range of editing possibilities. The original portrait can either be reproduced, via Painter’s cloning feature, using cloning brushes which emulate the style of, for example, the Impressionists or can be recreated using any of Painter’s wide range of drawing and painting tools. The original painting in Figure 6.12(a) was cloned three times; painting in the cloned images, using Painter’s Artist clone brushes produced the results in (b) using the Impressionist style, (c) using the Seurat style and (d) using the Van Gogh style.

Figure 6.12 Using Painter’s Arfist cloning brushes to recreate an original painting (a) in a number of alternative styles – (b) Impressionist, (c) Seurat and (d) Van Gogh

The results in Figure 6.13 were obtained using four of Painter’s other specific cloning tools: (a) used the Melt doner, in Soft Cover mode; (b) used the Driving Rain Cloner in Soft Cover mode; (c) used the Chalk Cloner in Grainy Hard Cover mode and (d) used the Felt Pen Cloner in Grainy Hard Cover mode.

Figure 6.13 Examples of Painter’s other cloning brushes

As stated above, any of Painter’s range of brushes can be used in clone mode either individually or in combination. Figure 6.14 shows the effect of cloning an original (a) using one of Painter’s special effects brushes F/XFire (b), while the result in (c) was obtained using a combination of the Spirex brush in Comb mode to paint in the flowing lines of the hair and then the Airbrush in Clone mode to add the soft focus image of the face. When the objective is to clone a specific portion of the original image, then a ‘ghost’ of the original can be displayed in the clone window for guidance as shown in (d). For further guidance the optional non‑printing grid shown can be switched on.

Figure 6.14 Using Painter’s tracing facility

Applying Surface Control

As well as applying a variety of different brush effects using cloning brushes, Painter provides the means of editing the appearance of all or a selected part of a portrait using what it calls surface controls. Figure 6.15 shows two examples. Placing the image (a) in Painter and then selecting Effects/Surface control/Apply surface texture opens the dialog box in Figure 6.16. The dialog box offers the user a number of ways in which to edit the image (or preselected portion of the image). The Using dialog offers a number of options, including Using Image Luminance.

Figure 6.15 Surface control in Painter

Figure 6.16 Painter’s Surface Control dialog box

Image luminance uses the portrait’s luminance to determine where to add surface texture, creating an embossed effect at the edges of the imagery as shown in (b). The Softness slider controls the transitions in texture, increasing softness creating more intermediate steps and a smoother distortion. Picture controls the amount of colour in the image – at 100%, the full colour of the picture shines through. Amount controls how much surface texture is applied to the image. Shine controls the highlights. Reflection can be used to map a clone source on to the surface at a variable percentage.

Creating a Mosaic

Some of the oldest surviving portraits from Greek and Roman times were created with the use of mosaics – a medium more enduring than most others in use at the time. Painter provides a twentieth century means of producing mosaic patterns. Figure 6.17 shows three simple examples. The method can also be applied to a scanned photograph or painted portrait by simply applying tiles to the image or selected parts of the image. After selecting the target image in Figure 6.18(a), the style of tile was selected from the Using dropdown menu in the Custom Tile dialog box (b), which was opened by clicking Effects/Esoterica. Sliders and a colour swatch provide the means of manipulating the tile characteristics and the colour of the ‘grout’ between the tiles. The result is shown in (c).

Figure 6.17 Simple tile examples

Figure 6.18 Applying Painter’s Custom Tiles to an image

More sophisticated techniques – in which the tiles can be made to conform to the colour and shading of the underlying image – called Make Mosaic and Make Tesselation allow users to design imagery in the style of historic tile mosaics starting with a blank canvas or working from an existing painting or cloned photograph. Tiles can either be ‘painted’ directly on to the canvas, where they remain selectable and editable as the design proceeds, or painted over an underlying image. The Make Tesselation tool creates tile inlay patterns which can be made to conform to the shape and colour of a cloned underlying image.

After a mosaic has been created, it can be given a three-dimensional appearance and/or further edited using Painter’s other brush tools. Figure 6.19 shows an example in which the same Photo CD image shown in Figure 6.18 was first cloned and then Make Tesselation was selected from the Canvas menu. After choosing the Pieces option from the Display dropdown menu (a), 500 points were addedautomatically to the cloned image, distributed according to the luminance of the clone source, lighter regions receiving a greater density of points, and so smaller polygons. Setting the check box in the colour palette (b) to use Clone Color, meant that the colour of the tiles was picked up from the colours in the original image. Additional tiles were added by hand in the areas of greater detail and, using the options in the Make Mosaic dialog box (c), final editing was carried out. The resulting mosaic is shown in (d). The result in (e) was obtained by overlaying the original image on top of the mosaic, with an opacity of 50%. The result in (f), giving the tiles a three-dimensional look, was obtained by rendering the tiles into a mask, using a command available from the Make Mosaic dialog box and then applying surface texture, choosing Mosaic Mask from the Using menu.

Figure 6.19 Using Painter’s Make Tesselation and Make Mosaic options to tile an image

Applying Filters

With each new release of painting and photoediting applications like Photoshop and Painter, the number of plug-in filters increases, offering effects ranging from the sublime to the truly bizarre. Many of them are unsuitable for use in the editing of portraits, but a few of those which can produce interesting results are shown in Figure 6.20. In all cases the Magic Wand tool was used to select just the face in the original (a) and then the filter was applied. The Notepapei filter (b) produces a textured greyscale effect. The Crystallize filter (c) produces an interesting Pointillist effect. The Mezzotint filter offers a range of mezzotint styles – (d) uses short horizontal lines. The Emboss filter dialog provides control over the depth of embossing and light direction (e), while Difference Clouds (f) produces an interesting solarised result

Figure 6.20 Using filters to create special effects