Today’s art-related Public Service Announcement is all about a company called Alien Skin, and a filter package called Snap Art.
I’ve been lucky enough to use versions of this going all the way back to its introduction. I recently had the honor of helping beta-test Version 4.
Wow.
Okay, backtracking here. This will mean nothing to those of you who are not photographers and/or digital artists, but the Snap Art filters can take an ordinary photograph (or any image), and help an artist turn the piece into a credible simulation of Real-World art media like oil paint, watercolor, pen and ink, colored pencil, pastel, etc. With much less time than the hours spent messing with Photoshop filters, or individual brushes in Painter or other freehand art programs.
For example, here is a perfectly normal shot of a Tuscan landscape.
Here is the same thing, run through Snap Art 4’s Impasto filter, Impressionist style, with adjusted brushstrokes, paint depth, and canvas surface.
Nifty of itself. I snicker at photographers sending filtered images to art shows now, whenever they tell of the hours they spent hand-altering the piece. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t. If they did, they are geniuses, masochists, or fools.
I use Snap Art to sketch out 8″ x 10″ versions of images, and map out the potential brushstrokes I need to get a certain ‘look’. Then I hang the sketch up by my easel, bring out the real paint and canvas, and get to work. This gives me a roadmap that I may or may not completely follow, but it’s a lot faster than agonizing over every single brushstroke placement.
I use Snap Art filters to soften and organically enrich the dull, flat areas of digitally-rendered human or architectural forms, or help hide my Painter additions to a piece of stock photography. The original stock version of this piece is different enough that I despaired of making it work, but Painter and then Snap Art saved the project (when I couldn’t impose on a friend to wear a red coat and stand on a rock for two hours.)
That’s the difference between painting as a hobby and painting as a form of livelihood – commercial artists do not have time to flail around being sensitive artistes. Tools like Painter and Snap Art do not replace creativity and learned skill. They merely augment it.
In Alien Skin’s case, they have an amazing blog that connects users and developers, and showcases some of the best digital art around.
Version 4 features a lot of newly-refined filtering parameters, a neutral gray application window that won’t hurt your eyes after staring at it for hours, and improved rendering and preview speeds.