The image above is a tiny version (click to enlarge somewhat) of a “painting” I made from a photo I took at Ryouanji (龍安寺 — the Ryouan Temple in Kyoto Japan) a couple of years ago. One of the toys I picked up on my trip to The States is a Wacom Intuos 3 pen tablet, which came with a copy of Corel's Painter Essentials 3 that I used to paint-ize the photo.

Corel's product is a mixed bag. It's just fantastic when it works, but it had a tendency to crash on me every five or 10 minutes, just disappearing without a trace (losing all my work in the process). I got into the habit of saving my work often.

I contacted Corel support, who basically told me to get lost because, although I paid for their product, I didn't buy it directly from them. That kind of “support” makes my blood boil. A web search for a fix found a lot of people angry with Corel for a total lack of support, but no solution to my problem.

Anyway, back to the painting, perhaps this should be filed under “easily self-impressed,” but I really like the results I was able to achieve between crashes. Here are some full-resolution crops....

Roof Near the Upper-Right Corner

Stump Near the Lower-Right Corner

End of the Path in the Center

I then loaded it into Photoshop and built up the frame, signed and dated it, and added a brass nameplate....

Content creation like the nameplate is not my strong suit in Photoshop. Well, not much is, but I've been able to do a few nice things, such as this photo touch-up for a friend's new-year's card, and some other things that I've written about before and are linked to in the “Followups and Related Posts” box below.

In creating the nameplate, I used five separate layers: the plate itself, the text, one for each brad holding the plate to the frame, and a final layer with which I tried to add a bit of sheen to the metal. It's all wholly pedestrian to a Photoshop expert, but was a fun challenge for me to try to figure out. It still looks sufficiently fake that I'll probably go back to futz with it further, but I'm not sure what it really needs.

What I really need to do is to find a place here in Kyoto where I can have the painting part (sans the frame) printed big-sized on high-quality rag paper (I think “rag” is the kind of paper that would make this look good). Then I need to find a real frame for it, and put it on the wall. I actually do have a small version of the original photo on the wall of my room, as can be seen slightly in the background of a picture on this post.