Welcome to my April 2022 Great and Powerful Blogging from A to Z Challenge!

Today, O is for Oilist.

So, this is a very new app to me, having been briefly introduced to it at my iPhone/iPad Artography class the other night.  But, man, it’s a cool one!  I don’t claim to have figured it all out yet, but here is what it can do in a nutshell:  “At its most basic, Oilist is a utility to make your photos look like oil paintings. But unlike similar art apps, this one cares as much about the process as the end result. Given a photo and a set of inputs, the app “paints” a composition right before your very eyes, stroke by stroke. It’s a living, breathing art filter.” Review: Oilist a virtual oil painter in your pocket.  And it really does work that way – you can watch the painting happen, and can “snap” a still of it at any stage.  In addition, there are presets and other editing features you can use to “drip” paint, or change the brushstroke angles – all things I still need to explore!

Now, I don’t necessarily advocate for making photos look like painting – perhaps you should take up painting for that.  But as a piece of a greater whole art work vision, running the painted version through other apps, it adds some neat effects.  In the end, you don’t necessarily know where you are going or where to end, so be quick to snap if you see something you like in the moment, because it will very quickly be gone.

There are many many styles to choose from, from Van Gogh, Escher, Manet, Monet, Kandinsky, Picasso, Hokusa, Klimt, Munch, Jennifer Bartlett, and many others.  Painters like Van Gogh and Monet even have several subsets of styles to choose from.  Once you choose a style, you select from a range of options from more to less abstract, then watch as the magic happens (and change presets and options as needed or wanted.)  It’s hard for me to describe, you really need to try it.  Here are some sites to review:

• Oilist Review: A Painter in Your Phone
• App of the week: Oilist review

Here are some examples with snaps from start, middle, and “finish”

Original image

Van Gogh – Spirals less abstract

Hokusai Gold more abstract

Jennifer Bartlett Ovals neither less nor more abstract

Thanks for visiting my 2022 A to Z Challenge – Letter O. You can find links to more blogs participating in this challenge at Letter O, A to Z 2022 Challenge Master List (Google Docs).