Turn Your Portrait Photos into Paintings Popular Science Monthly, April 1973 You paint with oils . . . and a little help from an argon laser, a color scanner, and a trio of computers By A. J. HAND PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR I don't know much about art, but I know what I like. And I like Personal Paintings, a paint-by-numbers portrait system from General Mills. Personal Paintings let me create the portrait you see across the page - not a bad job for my first effort with oils. I'm sure you could do just as well. Here's why: All Personal Paintings are based on photos. You send a color slide or print - it must be a portrait - off to Personal Paintings in Toledo, Ohio. Then space-age technology takes over to turn it into a prenumbered, 16-by-20-in. "canvas." How is this done? With gear developed by Itek Corp., the folks who designed similar photograph-analysis systems for NASA. First your photo is rephotographed on 70mm film. This allows for color correction, and converts the original to a standard size for the color scanner. This scanner - working much like a TV picture tube tracks back and forth across the 70mm image. It analyzes a total of 16,000 points, determining the color of each. The information goes on to a computer, which stores and analyzes the findings to determine what color paints you'll need, and how much of each. At the same time, another computer directs a laser beam over a sheet of photographic paper (this will be your "canvas") sketching out an enlargement of what the scanner sees. Color guidelines and paint code numbers are also printed onto the paper at this time. Finally, the photographic paper is developed and mounted on a heavy backing panel. The computer-assigned jars of paint are assembled and boxed along with the canvas, a pair of brushes, instruction booklet, and a practice panel . . . as well as your original photograph. This box is then mailed to your home. Now the fun begins. When you take your first look at the prenumbered canvas it's going to seem complicated. Don't let it scare you. Get out the practice panel and the instruction booklet - it's very clear and easy to understand - and go to work. The practice panel is a small section of a girl's face, and when you've finished it an hour or two later, you're ready for the real thing. Using the same techniques you've just practiced, start on the canvas. The techniques? Simple. Pick an area to start on - I picked the face - and analyze it. What's the lowest color number printed in that area? For a face it's usually "1". So open jar "1", and with your brush, fill in all the color blocks numbered "1". Move on to number "2", and so on. Keep it up until the area you're working is completely painted. Up to this point you've simply been taking orders from a computer, putting paint where it told you to. Now you're ready to put your own artistic ideas into play. Look at what you've done. Distinctly blocky, right? Blending will smooth it out. To blend, you just soften the edges between adjoining color blocks with a clean brush. Easy to do, but also easy to overdo. So you should work carefully, and check your progress as you go against your original photo. When you've blended the first area, start painting a second. From 10 to 20 hours are required to do it all. The quality of your photo affects the quality of your completed painting. I was a little disappointed that the color scanner failed to pick up differences in color between my wife's hair and the background of fall leaves. But the lesson is clear: Look for strong color contrast between subject and background in your original. Another thing: The scanner doesn't always pick up fine details. It missed the highlights on my wife's hair. No problem. Add those details after the painting is finished. By that time you should have learned enough about painting to improvise. Your photo's first stop on the road to becoming an oil painting is Toledo, Ohio. There, Chroma-Guide equipment developed by Itek Corporation analyzes the photo, and from it derives a paint-by-numbers canvas. The Chroma-Guide installation includes a rephotography camera (rear), color scanner, computers, and an argon laser. Here's what you get in the painting kit: a 16-by-20-in. prenumbered canvas, a pair of brushes, instruction booklet practice panel, and jars of paint. The canvas - actually a photographic print - has a semi-matte surface that's easy to paint over. Only a few of the paints are shown here. Price? $20 from Personal Paintings.

Small section of prenumbered canvas clearly shows the numbered paint blocks and laser-drawn sketch based on your photo. The sketch serves as an extra guide to supplement the color blocks. Author found he could disregard sketch. Face section with paint in place -but before blending - looks like this. The effect is pleasing but blocky. To smooth it out you soften the edges between color blocks with a clean brush. Blending allows you plenty of freedom for artistic expression. If you're not sure of yourself. keep blending to a minimum. Blended face section looks like this. Author decided to experiment at this point and overblended the mouth, giving it an artificial, ''airbrushed-photo'' look. Solution? He wiped all paint off the mouth and started over, as advised by instruction booklet. Final result appears in finished portrait, above. Back to Archive