Photo: can oil painting effect be done with a digital illustration? Or is it only for photos?

[Amy Choue]

I am working on with a designer on a book about Napoleon. It is a 4-volume work. My idea was to use a portrait of Napoleon for all the 4 volumes, with a different background color for each. So the same portrait for all, with differences in background color for distinction. The 4 volumes span the whole of Napoleon's life (minus the last 10 years, actually). There are many well-known, instantly recognizble portraits that have been used for books about him. I thought I'd better not use them and instead would have to choose one that will stand by itself for the Napoleonic era. So I chose the one I'm attaching here. The portrait I wanted was one that is based on this, but made into a full-length one, and that has a look of an oil painting. If such a portrait can be created (by illustration?) then it can be used for the cover, with some color combinations or variations for the background, I figured. 

So my question is, what can be done to add oil painting effect to a digital illustration? Can nothing really be done? The designer I'm working with says that the oil painting effect I've seen on Youtube is for the photos, and that it can't really be applied to an image that is digitally produced. Also that, if I really want to have a portrait that looks like an oil painting, a real oil painting will have to be painted, which will be quite expensive. 

I guess what she says is overall right. But I would like to know what can be done, if there's anything that can be done, to make a digital illustration have that look of an oil painting, not in a way that it can actually deceive our eye but in a way that is pleasantly deceptive. Attached also is the most recent draft for the cover, and I think there's actually much to be done, but not quite sure how to formulate it. Any suggestions, advice, pointers, etc. will all be deeply appreciated! I actually want to (however slowly and painfully) learn these things so that I can actually become able to create images I want, someday. 

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, Amy Choue said:

There are many well-known, instantly recognizble portraits that have been used for books about him. I thought I'd better not use them and instead would have to choose one that will stand by itself

Nevertheless, your selection appears to be quite spread, compare: https://lens.google.com/search?(…)

2 hours ago, Amy Choue said:

So my question is, what can be done to add oil painting effect to a digital illustration? Can nothing really be done? The designer I'm working with says that the oil painting effect I've seen on Youtube is for the photos, and that it can't really be applied to an image that is digitally produced.

There are quite a few oil painting effects available online. Usually these painting effects are effects only and they affect an entire image – unless you mask individually which may be quite time consuming for an 'authentic' result. Digital oil painting effects often use one brush size and create a more impressionistic look (like late 19th / early 20th century). In my understanding it does not matter whether such an effect gets applied to a photo or scan or a digital illustration, the difference may be more influenced by the amount of existing details and the image size (resolution).

'Classical' oil paintings were quite naturalistic (a substitute for photography, not invented yet) and used brushes of different shapes & sizes and thus created fine details (e.g. eyes, hair, lips) combined with more abstract areas (e.g. knobs, background), for instance:

 

Apart from that it seems your selected motif initially wasn't an oil painting but rather a lithograph that got water colourized later. Thus the details appear as black lines (drawn, not painted) and are rather equally spread. (Right-Click the image below to open it in a separate browser tab + zoom in to various areas, the clothing in particular):

For an individual title image it may be interesting to try one of the available digital image creators that are based on artificial intelligence. Since Napoleon images and history is quite known to the data base you could get appealing results.

https://open.ai/   |   https://www.midjourney.com/   |   https://playgroundai.com   |   https://pebblely.com/   |   https://magicstudio.com/   |   …

It may need some exercise to find the right website + the required keywords as describing code ('prompt') for a wanted image, while this also lets you add or remove details, objects, elephants, light, snow, etc. …
https://learnprompting.org/docs/category/️-image-prompting

[Amy Choue]

Yes, it wasn't oil painting but lithograph. I only recently learned about different techniques and materials of Western painting in its long history (I took a few courses on this subject, in order to be a better creator; all was overwhelming, while also very interesting, but to little/no avail until now. It's really hard to put what I learned to practice immediately. But then I'll have to remember how extremely clumsy I am about all design- or computer-related skills. Learning this much about photo editing was a feat).  

"In my understanding it does not matter whether such an effect gets applied to a photo or scan or a digital illustration"

That is what I thought too, because aren't they all in digital files any way? If the effect can be applied to photos, it should be applicable to anything else in the same digital file format. But the designer says that's not the case. 

It really will be great to be able to design on my own. I estimate 4 hours of study, 5 days of a week, for 3 months, will be the minimum that I'll have to invest to achieve that. To have that written down like that, it suddenly looks somewhat doable. But in reality, that minimum will be more like 6 months. (Maybe I'll really have to find ways to do this). It's hard to communicate with the designer, and somehow she seems to make things only easy for her too (ha....). 

So many thanks for the detailed comments and pointers. I'll learn a lot from them.