On the Mission Trail - Digital Paintings

 My husband and I love to visit San Antonio, just a couple of hours to the west of us. Usually we go during the Holiday season to see the River Walk all lit up with Christmas lights.  But a couple of years ago we decided to visit the San Antonio missions. I really enjoyed the trip, enjoyed learning the history of the missions and took literally hundreds of photos.

While I had some lovely photos when we got back, I never really did anything with them.  They just sat on my back up drive, waiting.

Recently I discovered a program called Impression by Topaz.  It's a very powerful art program that lets you create beautiful paintings, sketches and watercolors from your photographs. I thought it would be the perfect way to create some meaningful art out of my original photos.

The first paintings I worked on were Mission Concepcion and Mission Arches.

 This is available as a print here:  Mission Concepcion

From the Topaz Labs website:
"Impression helps make your photos more expressive by authentically turning them into art, the way a real painter would. Rigidly realistic photos sometimes leave less room for emotion, personal feeling, and story. Instead of just showing reality, take your viewers on a story by using Impression to capture emotion and feeling rather than details. This can make your work both more powerful and more personal."

This is available as a print here: Mission Arches

What's a visit to San Antonio without a walk along the River Walk?  I've always dreamed of being able to do a painting or drawing of the lovely stone bridges that cross the river, but I do worry that with the crowds of people that jostle along the paths on either side, I would end up in the water with the ducks! So I compromised and used Impression to create a colored pencil drawing, which you can see below, from one of the photographs I took on that trip.

This is available as a print here: San Antonio River Walk

Impression comes with a lot of presets, which are all wonderful in their own right.  And in addition you can make endless changes in texture, lighting, brush size and stroke to make each piece you create a genuine work of art.

These are only small versions of the paintings I made from my photographs, but if you click on them you can see a larger version and get an idea of the painterly detail I was able to create.

If you'd like to try Impression by Topaz, they offer a 30-day free trial. Just scroll down to the bottom of their webpage.   Enjoy!