Santa Barbara Tomb Impasto

Josh Carter is a graphic designer and software architect from Boulder, Colorado. Josh's design work includes photography, interactive application graphics, print design, and mobile phone themes. Below is his tutorial showing the use of Snap Art's focus regions and Impasto. See more of his work in our Snap Art, Bokeh and Exposure case studies or on his website: joshcarter.com

tutorial

This tomb shows a variety of materials and textures, and I felt it would make an excellent impasto. The original image has another object to the immediate right, and I didn't want my final image so crowded, so I duplicated the background from the left side of the image over to the right. I then used Photoshop's burn tool to create some shadows on the right to keep the image from looking too symmetrical.

original (left); after duplicating the left-hand background on the right and burning to create shadows (right)

Now with the composition to my liking, I brought the image into Impasto. I started with a large brush preset and gave it a healthy amount of paint thickness and color variation. However, it's essential to the image that the two crosses retain their shape–a perfect use for Snap Art 2's focus regions. I used one focus region on each cross, and adjusted the strength just enough to ensure the crosses retained their clear shape.

after applying Impasto

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