painting

Photographer Paints Pastels with Her Camera

Teresa Freitas is a photographer, although her photographs look more like airy pastel paintings. Her imagery is not just art for art's sake, but she makes a living as a professional photographer working with brands like Adobe, American Express, Chloé, Club Med, DKNY, Dior, Fujifilm, HP, Huawei, Issey Miyake, Montblanc, Netflix, Olympus, Pantone, Polaroid, and more.

Think Like a Painter in Your Approach to Photography

Consider this: think like a painter. Painting is basically an additive process: the painter adds paint to a canvas. Photography is basically subtractive: the photographer, through careful composition and cropping (or cloning in the digital darkroom), subtracts unwanted or distracting elements from a scene to create a vision -- or impression -- of a scene.

Learning Photography From a $90.3 Million Painting

Last month, legendary British painter David Hockney's 1972 painting titled “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” (shown above) sold for a jaw-dropping $90.3 million, the highest auction price ever for a living artist!

I Gave Up Painting to Do Photography, And It Shows in My Work

Painting and photography are often considered similar artistic expressions. Henri Cartier-Bresson was a painter before he became a photographer, and became a painter again in his retirement. While his artistic sense informed his photography in terms of his ability to see the world in constantly changing light and compositional potential, he never considered photography as art.

This AI Can Convert Paintings Into Photos and Summer Into Winter

A team of researchers at UC Berkeley have revealed an 'Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation' technique that can do something really interesting: it can turn a painting by Monet into a 'photograph'... also, it can transform horses into zebras and summer into winter.

These are Not Composites: Recreating Classic Works of Art with a Camera

Many a person can point to a particular moment that was pivotal in shifting the direction of their life. You might call it a “watershed moment.” For my father, photographer David Edmonson, his most recent watershed moment began in the spring of 2012.

How to Make a DIY Studio Portrait Backdrop for $46

Many moons ago I was enrolled in a class on portraiture by Don Giannatti that studied and sought inspiration from the greats in photographic portraiture. The final artist studied was William Coupon. Coupon is known for his formal painterly backdrop portraits. Being the dutiful student I turned my assignment in post haste, or rather several months late. Either way, I learned that creating a painted backdrop had to be neither difficult nor costly.

How to Turn a Photo Into a Painting with Photoshop

I recently had the absolute pleasure of meeting and shooting with Mackenzie Johnson! Today I'm going to share how I turned my portrait of her into a painting. Not everyone is a painter, but with a little time and patience -- and Photoshop -- I believe anyone can achieve this effect.

Video: This Cab Ride Through NYC at Night is Made from 3,454 Individual Oil Paintings

Stop-motion is a painstaking and labor and time-intensive process when you do it with photographs, so imagine creating an entire stop-motion video using only oil paintings. That's exactly what ambient folk band The Sea The Sea decided to do for their most recent music video, enlisting the help of artist Zachary Johnson to do the heavy lifting... or painting.

In all, the final music video is made up of 3,454 oil paintings that take you on a nighttime cab ride home through New York City.

Photographer Mixes Watercolor Elements Into Her Images to Stunning Effect

What's the best thing about a 365 project? Some would say it's that you develop the habit of shooting every single day. Others that you develop your skill because you're shooting more than you probably ever have. But for photographer Aliza Razell, the best thing about a 365 project is the ability to experiment.

And it's experimentation that led her to create the stunning images you see above and below. Images that combine watercolor and photography into something greater than the sum of its parts. Images that, as you probably already guessed, are spreading like wildfire.

Valentine’s Day Meets Pulp Fiction in This Creative Stop Motion Video

There's no use ignoring it, it's Valentine's day, and that means some cool photography related Valentine's stuff will invariably make it onto PetaPixel. No worries though, it's not all going to be sappy and romantic. Some of what we'll share, like this awesome 15-second stop-motion video, is downright hardcore.

Alexa Meade on Why and How She Began Turning People Into Real Life Paintings

Alexa Meade turned her first person into a real life, three-dimensional painting in April of 2009. Now, four years later, she is known the world over as the artist who uses the human body as her canvas, creating photographs you would be hard-pressed to differentiate from two-dimensional paintings.(Note: the video above contains some body-paint nudity)

Pixelist Turns Your Favorite Instagrams into Hand-Made Oil Paintings

There a good few Instagram-related services out there that offer you different ways to print, send and/or use your favorite Instagram shots. From Postagram, which lets you send your Instagrams as (sometimes free) postcards to friends, to the Nike web app that allowed you to decorate your sneakers based on an Instagram photo, we've seen quite a few applications.

The most recent idea to catch our eye is Pixelist, and it's gotten our attention because, unlike any of the rest, it turns your Instagrams into a hand-crafted product.

Artist: Criticized Photo-Based Painting of Kate “Doesn’t Photograph Well”

The painting above is the first official portrait of Kate Duchess of Cambridge (formerly known as Kate Middleton). When it was unveiled to the public earlier this month, art critics around the world bashed it for making Kate look ghostly and much older than she actually is. On the receiving end of all the criticism has been British artist Paul Emsley, the man who photographed Kate Middleton and then turned one of the photos into the painting seen above.

Artist Has Self-Portrait Painting Approved as Drivers License Photograph

Check out this portrait photograph of Swedish artist Fredrik Saker. It's actually a self-portrait that Saker painted by hand. While we've seen and shared photo-realistic drawings before, Saker's came up with a clever way of validating his photo's realism: he managed to have it approved as his drivers license photo.

Camera Obscura and the Paintings of Old Masters

Did you know that some of the most famous master painters from centuries past may have actually used camera "technology" to aid them in creating their masterpieces? According to the hotly debated Hockney-Falco thesis, some well-known artists likely used rudimentary camera obscura rooms as a tool -- essentially "tracing" parts of their work.

Artist Recreates Photos by Hand Using a Simple Date Stamp

Artist Federico Pietrella has a clever and impressive way of "printing" his photographs. After selecting one he wants to use, Pietrella recreates it by hand using nothing but a date stamp and ink. Pointillism is usually done with distinct dots, but each of Pietrella's dots are a short row of numbers indicating the current date.

Underwater Photos That Mimic the Look of Baroque Paintings

Hawaii-based photographer Christy Lee Rogers specializes in creating dreamlike photos of people underwater. Her project Reckless Unbound shows people swirling around one another while wearing colorful outfits. The photos are reminiscent of the paintings of old Baroque masters, who would often paint people floating around in heavenly realms.