A painting from Barker Pass, near Tahoe

This took a few hours. The software wasn’t making a good painting out of one of the wildflowers pictures. Finally I did one on Corel Painting Essentials 3 Defaults, then restored detail to the foreground. The restore detail doesn’t seem to be working right in the other painting types. I thought it was just me, but when, with the defaults setting, restore detail started working as shown in the demo video, I concluded there’s something off with the other programs. Anyway, this is art, so I’m not going to worry about precision. I wanted it kind of loose anyway.

I spent a lot of time in Paris making canvases out of photos. I would run one of the painting programs but stop it before it finished. Then I would smear it and then save it as jpg, then use that as a canvas for a digital painting.

With that in mind, I tried making the painting of the wildflowers and opening that in GIMP. Then I opened another Barker Pass photo, one that had just shale rocks in the foreground. I pasted it and then fiddled with the transparency using Color to Alpha. I have no idea what that means. I didn’t bother to look it up because I like how the visually simple rocks in the foreground let the flowers come through and the flowers look like rain, while the smeary background in the wildflowers picture made for a textured sky.