De-facing art?

De-facing in an artistic sense, actually . . . Steve Payne has developed a novel approach to portraiture - replacing the faces of existing portraits with photographs of modern personalities. He writes:

I was always drawn to the fun side of image manipulation, the kind of stuff you can do using photos of your friends.

When I first started using photoshop I learnt quite a lot by trying to do that sort of stuff, turning people into JEDI’s, putting them onto movie posters, etc. Then gradually as the years went by I moved on to doing more professional retouching jobs and as I started to learn a different set of techniques I didn’t really do as much of the fun stuff anymore.

So… With that in mind. I decided to do some fun stuff! Yeah, why not!




One thing I’ve always wanted to try (I have a list) is to incorporate someone into a painting, mimicking the painterly brush strokes and making everything fit and work nicely and look natural and stuff. There’s an art to head swapping, I’ve seen so many awful attempts. The most important things to consider are anatomy, perspective and lighting. If you can get those things right, you’re more than halfway there. My artistic ability serves me well with this stuff, I can just tell if something looks wrong.




So I found a bunch of images online, faithful photographic reproductions of original artwork by George Dawe. He was an English portrait artist who lived in St Petersburg in 1819. He was commissioned to paint portraits of Russian Generals who had successfully fought Napoleon in the Patriotic War of 1812 and over a nine year period he completed over 300 of them.

Luckily for me the two dimensional works of art are in the public domain because the copyright has expired (under UK law this typically means the author died over 70 years ago) this means they can be used as a basis for a derivative work without permission.

There's more at the link. You'll find his blog here with the latest entries, and his archive may be viewed in thumbnail form here. I like the way he's done it - although it's a bit jarring to see Steve Jobs as a Russian general! Perhaps he'd have invented i-Perestroika?



Peter