Every Picture Can Potentially Tell a Lie Part II

This is part two of my little short demo/diatribe, whatever you want to call it it, showing the progression of a digital painting. I think it is very important for the art collector and those who deeply appreciate art to see the work and effort that goes into making a digital work of art. It is also important to not be fooled by digital painting as it can be "easily" faked. I am seeing it more and more and sadly the older generations of artists and collectors who are not so "tech savvy" as the younger generations are, are unaware of this.

I am seeing far too many digital fine artists out there simply calling a "photograph" a digital fine art painting, when all they have done is created a digital fine art photograph! While their work may look painterly and hand-done, and albeit beautiful, all the artist has really done is put a photo on the base layer in Photoshop or Corel Painter, and used the smudge tool with varying different brushes and the sample all layers choice with additional layers on top of the original photo layer and created what they are claiming to be a "hand-done" digital painting.

I have seen the work of artists who are doing this and unfortunately these artists are living in countries where certain copyright laws are not applicable to them! Sad as it is, they get away with it, even when many of us are recognizing the photography that they are using and literally stealing from the photographer who took the image! The world of copyright law has been keeping an ever vigilant eye on this "dilemma" and because of this, there have been a number of new programs being released that can actually read a digital image.

Believe it or not, every single action you use, stroke you produce, and photograph you use in a digital work of art is all "encoded" into that work. No matter how cut up, spliced, blended, smudged, even if the original layer containing the photograph is removed, the code for every single thing you have already done is embedded into that image and can be read with these programs! So if you are caught using images not belonging to you, you better have permissions and rights granted for the use of those photographs!

You can click on these images to make them larger if you cannot see the layers I have. I have made three folder containing different layers. One for the background on the bottom, one for the horse, and the third for the horse's detail. I also have a new layer called Finish. I get to that new layer is all about in a little bit.

I just wanted to show a close detail of the face. It is still a little unpolished and rough. I do however what to keep that "chalky" painterly feel to this piece.

Here is another close up of the legs, which are not finished, not even close, but because there isn't a significant amount of detail on the legs like there is on the face, there isn't as much for me to do here to make them feel more complete.

I have gone and made duplicates of all my folders and their contents. My purpose of doing this is so I can merge all the horse layers into one and all the background layers into one. I still want to keep all the original layers broken up and separate, which is why I made duplicates. But I have not included the "Finish" layer into these merges. It is still separate!

So for this final screen shot before I continue on to Part III of this little tangent of mine, I would like you to notice I still have my original folders, however I merged the contents of the copied horse folder with the copied horse detail folder. Doing so created one layer containing just the horse in its most complete progression. Now I have a horse and a separate background. I will be going in and "polishing" the horse up and the background. Then I will move to the "finishing" stages.

Stay tuned...