Noel Martinez

Family Portrait Using Text

Family Portrait Using Text

BY NOEL MARTINEZ

Artist, Designer

Manila, Philippines

Noel Martinez creates iPhone art that sometimes defies categorization as it is not photography, painting, or typography. It is ìAppArtî, the beginnings of something new.

Step 1

The first thing I did was to start with a great portrait. In this case, a picture of my son, Ren.

Step 2

Then I opened up the “TypeDrawing” app and imported Ren’s photo as the background. I scaled and rotated the image until I got the desired composition. I set the opacity of the image to a very low amount so that I could just barely see his outline.

Step 3

Then I established the basic outlines of the portrait using a brush at low opacity. (Note: the faster you move your fingers the larger the font gets, so start off slowly.) I saved this image to the camera roll, to use it again later.

Step 4

Then I made a new image with just the letters. Save this file as well, as this will serve as a background for the final artwork.

Step 5

Without closing the app, I started a new piece by opening the image from Step 2 but using a font with a higher opacity than the one I used for the basic outlines. At this stage, I drew the midtones or the darker areas of the image. Again, once I was satisfied, I saved it to the camera roll.

Step 6

I wanted to add a texture to the piece, so using a blank canvas and the app “Grungetastic HD”, I created an image and saved it to my camera roll.

Step 7

I opened up the app “Brushes” and pressed the Layers button. I chose the image with only the letters as the bottom layer, then the midtones image as the second layer and the outlines image for the topmost layer.

Step 8

Now, using the eraser tool, I carefully erased the white part of the foreground image to reveal some parts of the bottom layer. Finally, I collapsed the layers and added the grunge layer at a very low opacity. The result has a semi-transparent image. This final image is saved to the camera roll.