Karen Sperling, a well-known Corel Painter Master and author of several Painter manuals and books, has recently released Painting for Photographers Vol. 2: Landscapes, a DVD featuring art lessons and Corel Painter steps for turning landscape photos into paintings. Compatible with Corel Painter versions X, 11 and 12, the DVD includes over ninety minutes of video plus two bonus tutorials and three sets of bonus brushes that simplify the painting process and provide exquisitely rendered oil and watercolour style brush-strokes master crafted by Karen Sperling herself. The Painting for Photographers DVD Volume 2: Landscapes is available at the Artistry website fro $139.95.

Website: Artistry Online

Press Release

Announcing Karen Sperling’s Painting for Photographers DVD Volume 2: Landscapes

We’re obsessed with landscapes. We love visiting them, we love taking photos of them. We love seeing others’ photos of them, and we love reading magazines and web sites about them.
Thanks to digital cameras and computers, we are quickly adding new skills to our landscapes obsession. No longer content with just taking the photo, we’re interested in transforming landscape photos into paintings.

What is it about painting landscapes that people enjoy so much?

Maybe it’s the ability to relive the experience we had travelling away from home. When you paint a photo of a place, you can revisit the location and memories of your journey there.
Or maybe it’s that painting from photos is a way to add your personal point of view of the subject and your response to it beyond what the camera sees. Of course photography is a form of personal expression. The angle, the exposure, the composition of the photo, even the experience level of the photographer will affect the photo and will result in different photos by different photographers of the same location. Add brushstrokes, color and tones and the photo is raised to a new height of expression of the individual photographer’s own thoughts and feelings that he or she brings to the subject, turning the photo into art and the photographer into an artist.

Here’s how Stephen Levine, a photographer in Hawaii, sums up why he paints his landscape photos:

“I’ve been a landscape/nature photographer for 30 years, but my inspiration comes from Georgia O’Keeffe and 20th century woodblock artists like Hiroshi Yoshida, Tsuchiya Koitsu and Kawase Hasui. For a long time photography was a hobby, and I accumulated yellow and green boxes of slides that filled a larger and larger corner of a closet. About six years ago I was juried into a gallery and began to focus more and more on my art to the point it is now my “mainstay” and clear passion. With Corel Painter, I have complete control over the image and with my own printers I can ignore photo glossy and photo matte papers and print on art papers and now rice paper. I see Karen Sperling’s work as a bridge to the view of the world as I feel it and want to portray it, using tools that I have confidence in handling.”
It’s our obsession with landscapes that led Corel Painter Master Karen Sperling, who wrote the original Painter manuals and four published Painter books, including the bestselling Painting for Photographers, to create the Painting for Photographers DVD Volume 2: Landscapes for turning landscape photos into paintings in Corel Painter.

Karen is a lifelong photographer who has her own closets full of landscape photos taken on travels throughout the United States and Europe.

“I’m a member of the Obsessed with Landscapes Club. Me and landscapes go way back. My dad loved to travel and take photos along the way. By the time I was eight, our family had travelled from our home in New York by car to California twice, stopping everywhere in between. In college I lived in London for a year and photographed my way through the British Isles and Europe at the advanced age of 19. I don’t know, Dorothy, is there really no place like home?” says Sperling.

The videos on the Painting for Photographers DVD Volume 2: Landscapes provide art lessons in addition to the software steps for transforming landscape photos into works of art in Corel Painter.
Sperling painted all the paintings in the videos from her own photos, including one she took in Idra (Hydra), Greece, at the age of 19.

The DVD, like all of Sperling’s Artistry instructional materials, is geared toward photographers who never studied art. Viewers learn such important art theories as how to tell if a photo is a good candidate to be turned into a painting; how to choose colors; and how to maximize the use of tones to create masterpiece landscape paintings from photos.

“Thinking you can paint just because you own Painter without studying the art concepts is like thinking you can play the piano just because you own one,” Sperling says. “You need music lessons to play the piano and you need art lessons to paint in Painter. I also believe it’s not as scary or difficult to learn the art theories as many people think it is. I don’t think you have to go to art school to paint in Painter. All you need to do is to study my materials—I include the art theories you need to know in addition to all the Painter steps.”

The Painting for Photographers DVD Volume 2: Landscapes is compatible with Painter versions X, 11 and 12 and includes:

91.24 minutes of tutorial movies
•      Art Lessons analyzing the art, style and techniques of famous landscape artists including Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, John Constable, George Inness, Vincent Van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, J. M. W. Turner, John Robert Cozens, Edward Hopper, John Sell Cotman, Thomas Girtin, Frederic E. Church, Granville Redmond, Thomas Gainsborough and Jack Wilkinson Smith.
•      Instructions for painting landscapes from photos in an oil style
•      Instructions for painting landscapes from photos in a watercolor style
2 Bonus tutorial movies
•      Instructions for turning seascape photos into paintings
•      Instructions for turning cityscape photos into paintings
3 sets of bonus brushes
•      Brushes that simplify the painting process and provide exquisitely rendered oil and watercolor style brushstrokes master crafted by Karen Sperling, based on her 20 years of experience working with Corel Painter starting with writing the software’s first several manuals.

The Painting for Photographers DVD Volume 2: Landscapes is available at the Artistry web site http://www.artistrymag.com/docs/dvd02.html

“Welcome to the Obsessed with Landscapes Club!” Sperling adds.

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