I have often been asked how long to create a ‘photo painting’? These are images that I create based on my own photographs of a scene. Textures are added and some are given a painterly finish. This is also known as ‘photo art’. I have talked before about my aim to create a mood with these images.
How Long To Create A Photo Painting?
There is no easy answer to the question. Some images take very little time, others I can go back to several times over a period of days. So I am going to take the photo paintings I created from a visit to Sheffield in the UK and go through the stages it took to get to the finished collection as an example.
Visit to Sheffield
I visited the City of Sheffield, England in November 2015 as I had a meeting with a client as part of my (then) day job. As I wanted to take photos whilst visiting I stayed overnight in a hotel (the picture of the bridge in my collage was taken from my hotel room window). While at the hotel, I planned the route I was going to take for my photo shoot. This included looking up the landmarks I wanted to include.
This led to a three hour walk in the morning wandering around taking photographs prior to my meeting with my client. I then traveled back to London by train late afternoon and stayed at a bed and breakfast in London. I sat on my bed at the B&B and went through the photographs I had taken in Sheffield. There were 40 photos, if I remember correctly, and I discarded 24 of them for various reasons.
Getting to Work
When I got home to Italy I downloaded all of the images from the trip on to my computer. At that point I had spent about sixteen hours in total on them. This includes the overnight stay which was expressly to be able to take photographs the next morning.
I eventually started working on the photographs and spent a couple of hours on them. The next day I spent seven hours and finished processing all 16 images. The images of Sheffield Town Hall were easy to do once I had completed the first one which took some time. With the first one it was trial and error to get the final look I wanted but then having achieved it, the remaining four images were quick to do.
The next day, I made three collages from the finished images (the ones I am using to illustrate this blog). This took about an hour and a half. I then spent just over two hours doing the background research for the information to accompany the images. By which I mean researching and writing the history for the images and identifying the key words for upload to my online gallery.
So at that point I had spent a total of twenty-eight and a half hours – and I hadn’t even started to upload them to my gallery!
Uploads and Notifications
I managed to get the three collages uploaded and then posted notifications about them on social media. My guess would be about an hour spent on that. Then the next day I uploaded the five individual Sheffield Town Hall images and the wonderful bridge at Park Roundabout. By the time the descriptions were written (each slightly different) and key words added that was another couple of hours work. So where does that get me to (using fingers to add up LOL) … I make that about thirty-one and half hours work so far and I still have 11 images to get uploaded.
How Long To Create A Photo Painting?
I guess we are looking in the region of thirty-five hours work in total for the Sheffield collection of 16 images and three collages; about two hours each? I think when people look at one of these images and they ask how long it took, they forget that it takes time, and skill, to go out and take the photographs initially. They have to be good quality, well composed and in focus. Then, of course, some take a quick time to work through to create a photo painting. Others take a lot longer as I have explained.
That was fun to work out and is interesting to compare with my acrylic painting where I average three to five hours for a painting!
You can see my collection of images for Sheffield at my RedBubble and Pictorem stores.
This article was originally posted in June 2016 and was updated and republished 19 February 2022.
Before you go
My name is Dorothy Berry-Lound an artist and writer. You can find out more about my art and writing at https://dorothyberryloundart.com.
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Thank you for reading!
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