Low Poly Acrylic Painting Art From a Photo

In this tutorial, I write how I made an acrylic panting from a photo.

This was me and my husband's summer project. As we couldn't travel during the summer holiday, we decided to spend some time making an art together. And we had a perfect subject, our dachshund puppy Taco :)

We couldn't find good instructions to make a painting from a photo so we figured it out by ourselves. If you find more efficient ways to make one, please leave a comment!

Simpler the better

The basic principle for us was to reduce the details. Because in the end we needed to paint with our hands and our skills were limited. We ended up making a low poly image and using only a few colors. By minimizing the details, the panting process was easier and the end result was better.

Digital and manual techniques

This art is a combination of digital and manual processes. At the transition point from digital (editing on PC) to manual (hand painting on the canvas), we used the laser cutter to engrave the image on the canvas.

Laser cutter

Canvas

Acrylic paints

The process of creating a low poly image was explorative procedure. We did it by trials and errors. So I cannot say what is the best way to do it but here I write what we did.

When selecting the photo, it is better that the photo doesn't show the details of the subject. For example, Taco has a part around eyes that consists of mixture of white-ish and grey-ish hairs. With a particular angle and lights, that part was clearly visible on the photos. And with those photos, the generated low poly image had too much details and didn't look good.

I used Gimp to pre-edit the photo to be more suitable for a low poly image. You want to make reduce the colors in the photo and each color should stands out. Because in the later phase you need to reduce the color manually. It is easier if the division of the colors is clear. I adjusted the contrast so that the photo has more contrast and the colors stand out.

You should play around with different adjustments during the pre-editing to create an ideal photo for the low poly image.

I used a low poly generator Snap. I uploaded the pre-edited photo and downloaded the jpeg image to my computer. There are settings you can change when converting the photo to the low poly image. You can play around here too.

We wanted only Taco in our painting so I used Fuzzy select tool in Gimp and removed the green background.

We wanted to laser engrave the low poly image to the canvas so we needed to convert the low poly image to vector graphic and create lines for each block in the image.

I used Inkscape to create the vector graphic. I imported the low poly image in Inkscape. I changed the document size to the actual canvas size and scaled the image to the correct size. I manually traced the image by drawing straight lines using the Bezier line tool. I got the low poly image of Taco with only lines without color.

Next step is an extra but it was useful when we were painting. I filled the blocks in the image with colors as a simulation. Here I can modify the lines if needed and play with colors without messing around the canvas. I limited the number of the colors and only used 9 colors for filling the blocks. In the end I got the image of Taco with the vector lines and filled with colors.

Some issues and questions:

• I used different layers for the lines and filling the blocks with colors. The reason of using layer was because I can hide the original image to see the progress of the coloring. But I some times forgot to select the right layer and drew lines or added colors in the wrong layer. For me the layers in Inkcape is not so convenient.
• At the very end I realized that I had two lines for each block which I traced with the Bezier tool. It wasn't a big issue in the end but I wonder why. Maybe some initial setting or line thickness?

I am sure there are more efficient ways to get the similar end results in Inkscape. If anyone who knows Inkscape please give me your advice!

We used the laser cutter: Epilog Laser Fusion 75W CO2, to engrave the vector low poly image on the canvas. We tested several times and found the right setting. We selected the layer of the vector lines and created the PDF file for engraving. The photo is the result of the engraved low poly image.

All the work after this is manually painting on the canvas. We used acrylic paints and painted the blocks. Painting with the brushes took time (especially when we are used to fast edit on PC), but it was very peaceful moment and we enjoyed it.

We are happy with the end result and planning to make a bigger one :)