Turning a Photo Into Art You’ll Want to Hang on the Wall
We forget the majority of photos after seven days. We take them, we store them in a camera roll, and then we forget about them, maybe under three hundred other pictures of dinner and sunsets and fuzzy group selfies. But some photos are worth changing that. One of the more fun ways to “save” a photo from the digital graveyard and transform it into something that could be wall art, part of a novel, or, yes, make a person cry in all the right ways is to learn how to convert photo in anime style – properly, with a bit of artistic sense. It sounds dramatic. It really is not. What it is, is intentional.
The visual style of anime is really weird. It’s able to convey emotion quicker than almost any other format. One image from an anime can convey the emotional weight of an entire scene – the melancholy, the happiness, the particular melancholy of ending things – without the aid of text, without a spoken word, purely through visual means. That’s why it works so well for personal photos. You are not just making a photo look different. You are changing how it speaks.
The Source Photo is More Important than You Think
Many people believe that a photo can be turned into beautiful anime art, no matter how poor the quality. This is only partially correct. An artist can work with bad photos – poor lighting, poor composition, poor posing – but they are fighting the photo. The higher quality the photo, the more the conversion can be an exercise in artistic merit than fixing problems.
Natural light is your friend here. Images shot in soft, directional light (golden hour, overcast sky, a window behind your subject) give more data to the artist to work with than does flash shooting, which turns everything into a pink or white wash of no shadows. Shadows are not an issue with a photo you want to turn into anime. They are actually useful. They indicate where the light source was, and that has a profound influence on the shading of the anime version. Remove the shadow and the image ends up looking like someone who has never seen the sun.
The other factor that people underestimate is facial expression. Anime art does not create expression – it enhances it. If the original picture has a warm smile, the anime version can make that smile radiate throughout the image. If the original was a bit wooden, or looked a little unsure, the anime conversion will still be that way, even with stylization. Some of the best conversions use an image where the person in the picture was not posing at all – an irrepressible laugh, or an intimate moment where the subject was not conscious of being photographed. These photos already have the raw emotion that is the key to anime’s success.
Making the Right Calls
But many artists get bogged down with style choice. Anime has literally dozens of styles and they don’t work equally well on everyone. A style based on the slow, reflective slice-of-life genre (subtle gradients, soft edges, pastel backgrounds with a watercolor effect) is great for character portraits and close personal encounters. It would look absurd on an image of someone in action at a sporting event or standing at the base of a mountain as the storm clouds roll in. That image needs stronger edges, higher contrast, a more dynamic choice of colours.
The right style match feels invisible. You look at the version and it feels right – the style of the original and the style of the conversion are like the right clothes for the occasion. A bad style match is a costume that is almost right. This is one of those things that is hard to explain but easy to spot, which is why you should be clear about your preferences for conversion before the work is done and not after.
The second big style choice that makes a huge difference to a conversion is the choice of color. The photo has a colour profile – warm or cool, saturated or desaturated, high or low contrast. A good conversion doesn’t just maintain that profile. It translates it through the lens of anime – which means deciding to make it warmer, or to cool the shadows, or to desaturate particular colours to create a particular mood. A photo might be slightly sad in its original profile, but feel really wonderful after a conversion that emphasises cooler blues and desaturation of midtones. It may even feel nostalgic and warm if it’s a warm conversion. These are not arbitrary choices. They are storytelling decisions.
Making It Personal Rather Than Generic
The difference between a generic anime drawing and a good one can often be traced back to the amount of information the artist has. Not just the visual from the photograph, but the contextual, about the scene. What was happening? Who are these people to each other? How will someone feel looking at this picture in 10 years? These are questions that might be asked during therapy, but they are actually very helpful creative briefs when converting art. They influence which elements get to be more visible, more abstract, or replaced.
An anniversary photo of a couple converted to anime art without context is simply two stylized characters. But converted with the understanding that it was taken on a holiday where nothing seemed to go right but they had a good time anyway – then the faces become more important, the background can be a bit messy or even whimsical, the colours can be warm but imperfect. Personalized anime art with this context is not an art lesson. It’s a relationship portrait.
There are also merits to using the converted anime style art as the foundation to something bigger – a comic, a print for a gift, a sketchbook, or even just a piece of art to hang on the wall. A photograph is a moment. An anime-style conversion is an interpretation of that moment to be continued. That difference is smaller than you think and greater than you might expect.