This is a follow up post to "How I am Building an Art Licensing Portfolio". In that post I talked about painting a lot of icons. This photo post will give you a better idea of how I do it. No worries if you pull icons out of your finished paintings. I am sure there are as many ways of doing this as there are artists :-)
This collection is acrylic paint on canvas panel. Click images to view larger.
Above are a few of the icons in my "Pumpkin Snow" collection. I scan in the finished icons so I can easily use them in a variety of situations for art on products.
I have scanned in the barrel. I chose the highest dpi that the scanner will allow me to choose. For this image that was 1,800 dpi. That means this barrel can be almost 3 feet in size at 300 dpi. Now it is time to turn it into a painting :-)
I like to leave some space in the painting so I can add other elements in Photoshop for variety.
Love how the blue makes this pop!
Notice the barrel on the flag - fun to change it up!
How do you create art for licensing?
Thank you for stopping by the blog. All of you sharing and supporting this blog makes it work! Sign up for my newsletter if you don't want to miss anything :-) .
Thank you for sharing Annie! How'd you get the added elements in PS to look like they actually belonged in the painting?
ReplyDeleteHEY Kimberly! I always have my highlight subtle or on the 'top left' of the paintings/images. I sometimes add a subtle blurred shadow (behind the gold pear). For the beige squash/gourd in the back right side, I deleted part of it so the 'grass' blades will show through. THANK you for stopping by the blog and all of your social media support! <3
DeleteThis is so fun to see! I love knowing how others work...thanks for sharing your process. Interesting that you scan the images so high...I havn't been doing them that high but it makes sense. Do you use an external hard drive to store the large files?
ReplyDeletePAM!!! I save the 'icons' like a single pumpkin as a high res. JPEG since in the printing process you loose a little quality anyway. That helps a bit with storage/space. I haven't been licensing that long, so I don't have as much art as someone in the biz for 20 years! I don't use an external drive for storage, but I do use one as back up as well as a service: CrashPlan. I always buy a computer with the MOST storage and RAM I can. Both my computer and external drives are a Terabyte in size. -- I like the images large so if they go on something like a Surtex banner they look nice and crisp :-D
DeleteI love seeing how you work, and after reading this I must try scanning at a higher resolution.
ReplyDeleteYes, if you want to put your image large on a trade show banner you need to do that. I do it because I have been a graphic designer for so long and it is handy to have the images very large sometime :-) THANKS a bunch for stopping by the blog!
Deletewhat a fun colorful collection!
ReplyDeleteTHANK YOU SO MUCH! And Thank you for following my blog :-) Great to connect with you.
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