I’m Not Happy
Many people want to convert their own special images to PBN sets they can paint. These images could be anything from holiday pictures to family photographs to a landscape they snapped on vacation. Unfortunately, many people are unhappy with the PBN set they receive.
There are usually three problems that occur on a personalised PBN set. These aren’t the best pictures and I will upgrade this post later. Now Read On.
Read more: My Own Painting By Numbers Art1. Subject Small Relative To Background.
The family look nice in front of a mountain range or forest, but they only take up a small portion of the image. Close in on the main subject and get good details.
Zoom in closer and get better detail on the main subjects. The background is very cluttered and a lot of colour will be taken up by the background.
2. Cluttered Original Image
Think about your image and especially the background. If the background is cluttered, or many shades of the same color, then many of the paint colors you receive will only be used in the background of the image, and this will reduce the number of colors available for the main subject of the image. You might, for instance, think that a wooded background makes a nice backdrop for a family painting It turns out though that of the 36 different colour paints you receive, about 20 of them are shades of green paint that can only be used on the background.
This is the original picture of my daughter. It’s probably not the best picture to use as a demonstration, because there’s no trees in the background. It will do though. It’s ‘as taken’ with no manipulation.
Firstly you need to get rid of the clutter in the background and there are a number of software programmes that will do this for you. In fact, why have a normal photo? why not try to get a different effect all together.
This picture has had the background removed with the inPixio app. With the background removed, all the paint colours are concentrated on the main subject. I could paint in my own background.
FYI, A Monet Interpretation
What I’ve done here is take the original photograph and put it through a Monet simulator. Although not what I expected, It’s come out very well. We do though have the situation of the background clutter that take up a lot of the paint colours. I’m going to leave this as it is though as I like it.
I converted the above image into a PBN image using on-line software, and then had the PBN image coloured in by that software.
3. Slavishly Following PBN Cells.
And this is how it looked. Pretty bad in my opinion. The reason for this is that the PBN instructions were followed to the letter. When painting your own personailised PBN image yu need to interprete the original image and not slavishly obey the cell colours.
You need to do things differently. You don’t just follow the paint cells. You need to blend colours, especially skin tones, and highlights to shadows. Some colours on the image won’t be reproduced on the PBN canvas and this’ll include the whites of the eyes. You’ll probably need to paint it twice to get the colour depth you want. Why follow the background cell colours to the letter (or is that the number), why not improvise and do your own?
Painting By Numbers: The Basics and Beyond is my book on advanced painting by numbers techniques. Click here to go to your local Amazon web page and read a sample. You can buy a Kindle version (for a Kindle device or Kindle App) or a paperback version. If you have Kindle Unlimited yu can read it for free. If you are in Australia, New Zealand or Japan; you can buy the paperback HERE.
