Photoshop: Impasto

Frustrated, she opened a seldom-used corner of Photoshop: the . Most digital painters ignored it. But Elara remembered an old forum post about “simulating impasto.”

Elara had always been jealous of oil painters. She worked in pixels, in the flat, infinite grid of a digital canvas. She could mimic the color of a thick swipe of cadmium red, but never its shadow —the tiny cliff of paint that catches the light, the physical thereness of a real stroke.

She began with a grayscale image of a single, violent brushstroke, painted with a rough, chalky brush on a transparent layer. She saved it as a PSD. Then, she went to 3D > New Mesh from Grayscale > Plane . photoshop impasto

Her flat stroke lifted off the screen . The white parts of the stroke became towering peaks; the black parts, deep valleys; the grays, smooth slopes. Photoshop had built a 3D model of her stroke—a digital mountain range of paint.

She rendered the 3D layer. It took a minute. When it finished, Elara gasped. Frustrated, she opened a seldom-used corner of Photoshop:

The stroke had volume. It caught an imaginary light from the upper left. The peak of the stroke was a bright, clean red, while the deep crevices were a rich, shadowed crimson. It looked like wet, thick oil paint.

She created a second layer, a vibrant red poppy petal. She placed the 3D mesh above it. Then, in the 3D panel, she changed the mesh’s material. She set the color to the red petal layer. She turned the Shine and Reflection way down, but cranked the Bump map to 100%—using her original grayscale stroke as the bump. She worked in pixels, in the flat, infinite

Her latest commission was for a book cover: a field of poppies under a stormy sky. It needed to feel tactile, desperate, alive. Her standard soft brushes rendered it smooth, plastic, and dead.