For this photo-art tutorial, we have chosen a rather difficult subject, the portrait of a beautiful woman, to put to the test the combinations of Photoshop tools and filters in creating a digital painting in the classical style of Madame X by John Singer Sergent. The file size is 3.9 megapixels.

Save a copy of the original photo in the clipboard (Select All and Copy).

Open the Layers Box in the Window Menu. Create a duplicate layer by clicking Command-J (or drag the background to the New Layer Icon)

 

Set the foreground color in the toolbar to a gray tone (approximately
60% black) and the background color to white.

Click on Filter>Sketch>Chalk and Charcoal

Slide the Charcoal Area ruler to 6

Slide the Chalk Area ruler to 20

Slide the Stroke Pressure ruler to 1

 

Click on Filter>Brush Strokes>Spatter

Set Spray Radius to 10 and Smoothness to 5. Click OK.

 

 

 

Set the Current Layer to Luminosity in the Layers Palette.

Flatten the Image and save the file under a new name.

Click on Filter>Artistic>Paint Daubs

Slide Brush Size to 2 and Sharpness to 4. Keep Brush Type Simple.

 

 

 

 

 

Create a new layer with the original image.

Click on Filter>Artistic>Underpainting

Keep the Brush Size at 6

Set the Texture Coverage to 20

Keep the Texture as Canvas

Slide the Scaling to 100%

Slide Relief to 4

In Light Direction choose Bottom Left

Click OK

 

 

Set Opacity to 80%

 

 

 

 

Create a second layer with the original image and set Layer mode to
Multiply.

Click on Filter>Sketch>Photocopy

Move the Detail slider all the way to the right to 24

Set Darkness to 2

Flatten the image

 

Click on Image>Adjustment>Selective Color and drag the sliders until you obtain the desired color scheme. In this particular case these are the parameters:

Red Slider: C 50% / M 0 / Y 0 / K 0
Yellow Slider: C 0 / M 0 / Y 0 / K 50%
Green Slider: C 0 / M 0 / Y 0 / K 0
Cyan Slider: C 0 / M 0 / Y 0 / K 0
Blue Slider: C 0 / M 0 / Y 0 / K 0
Magenta Slider: C 0 / M 0 / Y 0 / K 100%
White Slider: C 50% / M 0 / Y / K 0
Neutral Slider: C 18% / M 0 / Y -9% / K 0
Black Slider: C 0 / M 0 / Y 0 / K 0

Click HERE to see the final painting