Ketchikan is a lovely little town but unfortunately holds the record for being among the wettest little towns in Alaska with an average of 150 inches of rain a year, which is almost 400cm of water. Their record was about 50% higher than that. Good thing the salmon seem to like the rain as they claim to be the Salmon capital of Alaska as well.
Of course, when we arrived, it was raining hard! We had our waterproof clothing ready, and nothing was going to stop us from seeing the town and so our first stop was the delightful little area known as Creek Street. Back in the lawless days (and this was also known as Alaska’s first city), the lumberjacks, loggers, miners, fishermen and other local miscreants went to misbehave at Dolly’s House, a brothel that is still there (at least as a museum although I do wonder what the exhibits are!)
So, our view of Creek Street was wet and soggy with heavily overcast skies:
Colors can be quite saturated when it is damp and cloudy, and this certainly shows off the brightness of the place, but it is nowhere near as attractive as it could be on a warm sunny day. I thought back to my experiments with digital painting and began to wonder if this was the place to try again. I wasn’t really happy with my attempts in that article – too close to the underlying photograph, and so here I decided to try to create something that is more like an artist would capture. This is my new impressionistic view of Creek Street in oil:
Now this is much more what I had in my mind. Now it feels warmer and almost sunny, the grey clouds are a bit bluer and the whole place regains some of its magic. I decided to adopt the same style for a different view of the boardwalk. The image here had plainer grey sky, which was reflected into the water, so first I had to give the sky more of a blue sky and clouds feel and mirror that in the water in the right places and then convert to oil. Once again, I am very pleased with the results.
I decided to try two more variants just to see how they looked on this second scene. The first was a pastel crayon effect, which is somewhat similar to this impressionistic one:
This one maintains the warmth of the scene but adds more details to the buildings and signs. Definitely an interesting treatment! My final attempt was at watercolor painting:
Well, now I am not sure which I think best illustrates this scene. You can look at all the images side by side by clicking on any of the images above to compare and then click on that page to make them larger, but I do wonder if too much choice can be a bad thing!
This story concludes my series of articles about the Alaskan cruise offered by Viking Cruises that we took in early June 2022. The rest of the cruise down the coast to Vancouver, was interesting, but nothing much that can be written about! All of my Alaskan images can be obtained as prints via this link. If you are interested in other images from my portfolio, all with free shipping and a 30-day money back guarantee, you can find that here.
Bob Decker
27 Jul 2022I like the effects! Lovely work indeed.
Steve Heap
28 Jul 2022Thanks Bob
Annie
28 Jul 2022That’s a very colourful place, perfect for photography I would think. I would be interested to read a blog about the techniques you have used to make the oil painting conversions. Personally I use photoshop for this type of thing but am never happy with the results. Have you thought of doing a more pastel version?
Steve Heap
28 Jul 2022I did try different approaches in that recent blog post about the historic building in Morgantown, but I haven’t really done a full painting blog. I did write about working on an image from Athens in this blog post: https://backyardsilver.com/how-much-photoshop-work-is-too-much/. The painting bit is linked at the end. I might try a pastel and watercolor version of this little scene as well. We did buy a watercolor from a local artist in the town – that might be interesting to use as inspiration!
Alessandra Chaves
28 Jul 2022What a lovely little town. I liked your painterly treatment of it, very cozy and happy feel.
Steve Heap
28 Jul 2022Yes, I think this worked well with this scene
hotshotphotoguy
30 Jul 2022Great work and glad you showed the many different techniques.
Steve Heap
31 Jul 2022Thanks Jim!
Louis Dallara Fine Art Photography
4 Aug 2022What is art? But I’m a photographer. Love them all, it’s great to experiment and the oil paint effect mind look great on a fine art canvas.
Steve Heap
4 Aug 2022Yes, there is a canvas sort of surface on the image, but I agree – it would look impressive on a large canvas. Just don’t tell Katrina who paints for real!