What the heck is a "Pentinmento" you may ask. And, no, it is not a word I created with my vivid imagine. Like everything else, there's a back story here.
I started out as an avid photographer. Over the years I found my self with 10,000's of photos. And they were very good, some much better than others. I even won a few awards and exhibited in several shows. I loved my Nikon SLR. I was able to capture images and light that were so spectacular. Then Mobile phones started upping their game with their cameras. Suddenly even the most pedestrian person could take incredible photographs. Then the phones added editing features that smoked even Photoshop. Adding insult to injury, they were not lugging a 2.5 lb camera around. The images I had taken over the years were now just noise in the massive world of digital photography.
One day I found a painting on the world wide web that I really liked. Reading more about it, I found that it was actually a photograph that the artist had painted over, taking a mundane photo and turning the image into a work of art. Certainly I could do that. Maybe my years of photography were not in vane after all. So I did some research, initially to learn more about the process. That led me (down the proverbial rabbit hole) to the history of the art. It dates back to the Renaissance (16th and 17th centuries). Artists used the method to layer paintings, starting with a neutral background or sketch layer, then adding colorful elements over the background to create the final piece. Also, when painting a portrait, they often found the subject or their patron not satisfied with the final product . Instead of starting over, they would make revisions (from repainting the entire face or the body silhouette) to please their patron.
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