Jenny: A Digital Portrait

‘Cloning ‘ is a widely used digital technique particularly for portraits. Traditional artists tend to get a bit sniffy about the technique – justifiably - since the aim is to dress up a photograph to look like a painting. But the software is here to stay so the problems it creates have to be addressed. I used to raise my hands in horror but there are artists around who approach the method with honesty of purpose. This is my first real flirtation with the technique and essentially you simply overlay the photograph on screen with a translucent layer and rub over it with a special cloner brush which picks up the underlying colour. You then work on it with ‘pastel’, ‘oil’ brushes whatever to give the work a hand finished look. The hand ‘painting’ has enabled me to remove the clutter of Jenny’s teen age bedroom – though the face owes more to the photograph than it does to my digital brushwork.