Change Your Photograph into a Hand Painted Picture

Color portrait photo will look more artistic if you change it to black and white image. The same case will be similar if you change it to vector image with outline correction which is changed just look like pencil or pen hand painted.

Lineart style looks so fascinating indeed and the result image looks like real painting. You can use this facility to make a special present for your beloved one. You just need to be patient and a vector graphic software. Do you want to try? Just prepare Adobe Illustrator CS4 software and follow the instruction below:

1. Activate Adobe Illustrator and open a new worksheet. Insert the photograph that will be modified, by clicking [File] > [Place..]. In Place box, click [Place]. The photograph will appear on the worksheet. Enlarge the photograph by pulling the each edge of that photograph by using a mouse pointer

2. Lock the layer of the original photograph so that it will not get edited unintentionally. Click the second box from the left in front of layer name until a padlock picture appears. Create new layer by clicking [Create New Layer] button and name it “Lineart”.

3. Click [Pen Tool] on the toolbox. Use black line for stroke line and click black Swatch palette, use transparent color for fill box (click [Fill], and and click [None] button).

4. Start to create line forming face object. Face lines usually consist of many smooth points. Whenever you create new anchor point, don’t forget to re-click the previous anchor point you’ve made before so that the subsequent line will not be influenced by the previous line.

5. To stop painting a line segment, press [Enter] button on the keyboard. Start creating another line segment and don’t forget to draw neck, ear, lips, nose, clothes until hair pieces. Left the eyes part behind since we will edit it with different style.

6. Change the line segment appearance or face shaping line looks like pencil writing by selecting all lines by pressing [Ctrl] + [A, then click [Brush] tab on the right side of panel row. Choose [Charcoal] brush, and to see the result, remove the eye sign in front of photo layer.

7. Shape the eyes starting from the eyebrow, eyelid, cornea and pupil. First, create the cornea with [Ellipse Tool] in form of a circle with black outline. To make a full circle, hold [Shift] button while dragging pointer shaping circle.

8. Crate a smaller black circle with no outline and place it in the middle of cornea circle. Create two white circles also with no outline for making a light bounce effect on the cornea. Place it in the pupil circle, then create the eyelid and eyelashes.

9. Add color to the face image. Click the layer filled with photograph, then make a new layer on it. After that, click [Pen Tool]. Direct the pointer to “Fill” and “Stroke” color box. Remove the color for Stroke, and choose the “Fill” color which is appropriate with the original color if the photograph. Create the path following the shape of face, neck and ear until done.

10. You can add a shadow to make the picture catchier. Create a new layer name “Shadow” . Place the layer on the color layer. Add the shadow by the same way when creating color path for face.

11. Press [Ctrl] + [A] to select all shadow path. Click [Transparency] tab .Select [Normal] option for “Blending Mode”, and arrange the “Transparency” value between 20 - 50 percent. If you have done it, reopen the color layer and remove the eye sign on photo layer to see the result. Save the picture.