Digital Figure Study

I continue to play around with painting in Photoshop, and I finally have a figure study I'm not embarassed to share. This is actually the third version of this image. I decided that I really needed to push the colour and texture a little to create a little more interest in an otherwise monochromatic painting, so I banged in some greens, blues and purples and massaged them into the original warm oranges and browns. A lot of this is experimenting and playing with the various brushes and settings that are available in Photoshop. I think it has a bit of that trashy paperback/pulp look from the 50s and 60s. Kinda fun...

My Fall painting class has started, so there should be some posts of acrylic landscapes again soon. But I'm not giving up on the digital world!

More Digital

I spent a few days either side of the Labour Day weekend on Georgian Bay, and I felt it was time to attempt a digital landscape painting. All I had to do was look out the window, after all... Really this is just a quick study, not a full landscape, but I'm getting a better painterly feel for the medium. It's still pretty rough around the edges, but it's coming.

The physical size is about 10x13 inches, so I was working at about 50% to fit the entire image on my monitor. This helps with the principle of working broadly at the beginning of a painting, getting the big shapes and value relationships early, and not looking too closely at detail too soon. In fact, there is not really any fine detail in this painting, I left it in a very sketchy (in places nebulous) state, as the detail illustrates.

There is likely enough here that I could increase the size of the "canvas" and spend another hour or two making a much more detailed finished painting, but that was not the intent of the exercise.

I'm pleased with how this is going, but with any luck I'll have a couple of more traditional painting classes starting in a couple of weeks, so there will be more acrylic demos to show. However, the digital isn't going away; you'll see more soon.

Different Strokes

Is painting in the digital realm still painting? I think so, and as I work to improve my skills  in that arena I will occasionally post my progress here. As an illustrator I have allowed myself to slip out of the mainstream, which is more and more digitally based. So, time to pull up my socks and get to work.

Actually, I have been working on this tangent in a fairly focused way for the past month, and I finally have an image I'm prepared to post.

This was produced in PhotoShop 7 with a Wacom Bamboo tablet. I only used the basic soft and hard brushes and the eraser tool. This is just a study, a sketch, but in the face I think I've managed to capture a real painterly quality.

I'll keep at it, and I hope the next post will have some colour in it. Cheers.