FotoSketcher: Digital Art Creation for the Non-Artist

Once in a while, you might look at a photograph and think to yourself how wonderful it would appear as a sketch or painting. Professional digital artists use programs like Corel Painter to turn photos into art, or create digital paintings from scratch.

Painter is also a complex and expensive program that has a fairly steep learning curve. There's also the lighter Corel Painter Essentials, but it still costs about $50.00. For non-professionals, there's an easy-to-use freeware Windows program called FotoSketcher that almost works like magic. It's a safe download that contains no malware or spyware (I've used this program myself for a number of years). It can even be used commercially. Figure 1 shows the program's home page.

Figure 1. The FotoSketcher home page.

There's also an experimental version for Mac from the creator's website. I've found that I can run FotoSketcher using WINE (a Windows-Linux compatibility program) on my Linux desktop computer.

FotoSketcher can simulate a variety of painting styles, pen and ink, pencil sketching, and more. The screen shot below (Figure 2) shows the drawing parameters in which you can control the drawing style, size of paintbrush, precision of paintbrush, etc.

Figure 2. The Drawing Parameters dialog box allows you to customize the effect.

Figure 3 shows the final result of turning a photograph of a beautiful Austrian village into a digital watercolor painting.

Figure 3. A photo of an Austrian village turned into a watercolor (Photo credit:Pexels).  

Use FotoSketcher in Conjunction With Other Free Programs

If you're a small business owner who designs your own marketing materials, FotoSketcher allows you to be a little more creative. I often use FotoSketcher along with other free programs like Paint.NET or GIMP (which I briefly discussed in my previous LinkedIn article, A Look at 3 Free Photoshop Alternatives: No-Cost Image Editors That Can Get the Job Done). GIMP is free open-source editing program. Learn more about this powerful program at www.gimp.org.

First, I used FotoSketcher to apply a vintage look to an image of some antique watches (Figure 4). I played around with the settings until I got the look I wanted. 

Figure 4. Applying the FotoSketcher's Vintage Photo effect (photo credit: Pexels).

Then, I used GIMP to create a flier for a fictional antique store with my wife's name (she always wanted to own an antique store...at least she can see her name on the flier). The example below (Figure 5) is the final result.

Figure 5. The final result of my fictitious flier.

Conclusion

FotoSketcher is an easy-to-use program, although the rendering process can take some time. It has a user-friendly interface and isn't overly complicated, so you can put it to use right away. For a free program, it has much to offer―it's a great way for non-artists to create fantastic works of digital art.

To learn more, visit https://fotosketcher.com/.