I’ve been an artist for all my life (45+ years), beginning with my own feces (Yeah, I know, how crude. But, have you ever seen a small child discover the delights of what’s in his or her diapers?), to pencil, to charcoal, to oil colors, to pastels, to watercolors, to gaining skill with today’s hi-tech acrylics. Making art is necessarily a messy and expensive activity, and can be quite frustrating when things don’t come out quite as you envisioned them.

Computers have revolutionized the way I do art, and I’d like to share some ideas and techniques with all the artists out there who also enjoy creating computer graphics. If you have PhotoShop installed on your computer, you have all the paints and brushes you’ll ever need to not only begin a new painting, but finish and enhance a partially completed work that’ll make your eyes bug out. Below is an evolution of a painting I started in 1998, but never finished until I scanned it into my computer and attacked it with the marvelous tools available to me in PhotoShop.

First, I had to scan in the painting in two pieces, as the canvas was 12" x16", but my scanner bed only 9" x 12". That was the biggest challenge, as alignment was critical to a good, seamless “stitch.” It helped to measure and pencil alignment marks on the back of the canvas so I could position the painting correctly on the scanner.

I brought the two pieces into PhotoShop side-by-side, created a new, empty PhotoShop canvas large enough to accommodate both pieces, and copied each half on a separate layer so I could begin the tricky stitching process.