Lady In Red

Hi all,
I'm here again with another digital painting and to give you inspiration if you have ever thought of going digital.

The painting came about after I took some photographs of bees in my front garden. You may have gathered by now that I like painting flowers and, as beautiful as flowers are, I think they look better with a bit of life on them. So, I was photographing bees to give me reference material for future paintings.

When I looked at the images that I'd taken on the computer screen, this one jumped out at me and was asking to be painted.

Quite a daunting task you are probably thinking and you'd be right if I was doing it in traditional materials. Doing it digitally made the whole thing a lot easier. I tried to make this one look a bit more painterly than my recent efforts and I think it went well.

Here is the finished painting that was, as usual, done on my ipad using a app called Procreate.

Overall I think I did it justice although I'm not 100% happy with the bee. You may be wondering how long it took to paint all those tiny flowers and leaves. The answer is 13 hours. I know that because Procreate records how long you have been working on a painting, in fact, it tells you how many brush strokes you have taken too, why you want to know that I don't know.

If I'd been painting each one of those flowers individually, like I would have done when using traditional material it would have probably taken over 100 hours.

Doing the painting digitally meant I was able to create a brush in the shape of one small flower. I used this in various colours and levels of opacity to place flowers on the screen very quickly. I created 3 brushes in total with 3 different planes and this allowed me to get the rounded shape of the full bloom.

It sounds complicated but in reality it is very simple. If you would like to see how I did this painting, here is a short video which will show the method in more detail.

If you like the video please consider subscribing and I will have another one coming along on few days. If you have any questions about the video or digital painting please let me know.

A Robin

Hi all,
One of the things I could never master when doing traditional art, was painting leaves. I knew what I wanted them to look like, but I could never achieve anything like a satisfactory result.
Here is an example.

Okay, they probably aren't the worst leaves you've ever seen, but they are not as good as I would like. The big issue for me is the veins. Because it isn't possible to paint a fine light line over dark paint, there were only two options. The first was to use masking fluid to mask out the lines, but it never worked for me because the masking fluid wouldn't go on fine enough. I tried using just about everything from a bent nail to a spider's leg but it was still no good. The other method I tried was to paint around the veins. If ever you've tried that method you will also know that life is far too short.

So in the painting I've just completed I set myself the challenge of painting some realistic looking autumnal leaves, and because leaves on their own don't make for a fantastic composition, I added a robin.

I know, summer has hardly arrived yet and I am painting autumnal scenes with a Christmas robin, sorry about that. Anyway, here is a picture of the finished painting.

I think it would make a nice sympathy card. I also think you will agree that the painting of the leaves is much better than the one a above. It is so much easier using digital media, fine lines of the lightest colour will cover even the blackest black so it has to be a winner. All you need to do is concentrate on painting your image not wrestle with ways to achieve it.

If you would like to see how I painted the image I have made a short youtube video. Here is the link.

Please consider subscribing if you like it and another will be along soon.