He was the first president to have a beard.

Welcome back to another segment of “styled”. This week I’ll be showing you how to take a black and white portrait and convert it into something with a little more punch. You can use these tips for a painting or for treating your favorite photographs.

For an example, I’ll show you a recent project of mine. I’ll call him “Abe”. I recently came across a painting of Abraham Lincoln when I went to the Art Fest Midwest this year at the State Fairgrounds. The one I saw was pretty good and it inspired me, but it was on such a small scale. Abraham Lincoln has such a cool face that I thought it would look really cool, really big. Plus he’s my favorite president. And why wouldn’t you want a giant Abe Lincoln face in your living room? That the eyes follow you wherever you go… and he watches your every move…. Ok, it’s a little creepy. But I’ve always been a fan of Andy Warhol and his silkscreen prints and wanted to try something in that sort of big, bold, colorful style.

Here are the steps I took to get there:

1. First, I went online and found a picture of Abe that was simple enough and had a lot of contrast.
2. Then I opened it in Photoshop and increased the contrast even more.
3. Then I used the “poster edges” filter to make the edges more defined, thus easier to paint.
4. After that, I selected the areas of the photo that I wanted to make a color.
5. In the layers palette, I added a new color layer and filled in the selected areas with some bright, poppy colors.

This is a great way to modernize an old portrait.

Once I got Abe all colorized, I blew it up to a size that fit my MDO board and printed it out to use as a guide for painting. I tried to match the colors as close as possible to the paints I had available at home. Abe’s very large portrait (36”x48”) now rests above my couch. You’ll see more of him in a later post.

And yes, there’s also your fact of the day: he was the first president to have a beard. He was the coolest.