- The Sugar Beet Vendor
Samarkand. The Silk Road. The Himalayas. The Gobi Desert. Such magical names. Once upon a time double-humped camels laden with silks, spices, pearls, jade and gems from China stopped here before going on to the port cities of the Middle East.
The magic still exists. Strong Asiatic faces with high cheekbones and slanted eyes…the men wearing embroidered caps called “tubitekas”, the women dressed in geometric silks of yellows, reds and purples. Mulberry trees dropping ripe berries on shady streets lined with homes hidden by high garden walls. Now and then I’d peek in an open gate and once I saw a family eating on a vibrant colored carpet laid with samovar and platters of food. Oh! I wanted to go in that garden, but no one beckoned to me. To be truthful, I don’t think they noticed me and even I would not presume to enter while a family eats their meal.
The woman in the photo above was selling sugar beets or maybe it was potatoes in the market. Her posture tells us that she is confident that she will sell her goods.
I made this slide, taken in 1989, into a digital painting. The slide was pretty contrasty and not as warm-hued. I also cropped it a bit to emphasize the diagonal line of her body, but not completely cropping out the bucket on the right lower corner. I like that bucket! It is a painterly bucket. To give the photo some brush strokes, I used a ‘prism’ that I made in Photoshop. Now I can’t remember how I made it, but it looks as if I took a photo of an old wall with peeling paint and used Snap Art 3 on it. That made it into an abstract painting with pronounced brush strokes which I overlaid onto this Uzbek woman.
If you could see the digital painting up close, I believe you would think it was a photo of an oil painting. I am happy with this result. To get to the ‘happiness level’ takes trial and error. Don’t give up is the main thing. Your inner voice will direct you if you listen to it. The wonderful thing about digital painting is that if you don’t like what you have made, you can easily go back a step or two or more and begin again but not from the very, very beginning… unless you want to, of course.
The main thing is to START… as my daughter says, “it’s a process.”