Birthday Card

Hi all,
It was my wife's birthday last week so I painted her a birthday card. I didn't paint it to save money, I did it just because I knew she would appreciate somebody making an effort. And let's face it, buying a decent birthday card these days isn't easy. I sometimes wonder what sort of person decides what makes a good card, certainly a lot of the ones I see on the shelves range between being thoughtless and damn right offencive.

Anyway, my wife has a taste for cards that lean a bit towards naive art, so that is what I did. It is based around some lovely partridges that used to visit our garden. There was about eight of them to start with and I took some photos of them. However, during the next few month their number began to reduce. Slowly but surely over a period of about 9 months, one at a time, they finally disappeared all  together.

We live on an housing estate so they could have been killed by cats or perhaps run over, but I like to think that they decided that the woods were a better place to be and that is where they are now.

My wife loved to watch those partridges so I thought she'd like this card.

Thankfully she did like it and she was so pleased it is now hanging on our wall in a frame.
If you would like to see how I painted it here is a link to the short video I made showing how it was done.

If you like it, please consider subscribing and you can see how I progress now that I have changed to digital art. Thanks.

Blue Butterfly

Hi all,
Just finished another digital painting. This one is of a blue butterfly on a Bird's foot trefoil flower. The composition of the flowers came out of my head, which to be honest isn't my preferred way of working. I'm not good at imagining scenes, so find it much easier to work from a photo. From now on that is what I'm going to do.
Here is the painting.

It looks very complex and time consuming composition, but due to the fantastic medium of digital art, it was easier than it looked. If you watch the video that is linked below, you will see how I did it.
I only had to paint one trefoil flower, the one the butterfly settled on later, and from that I cut and pasted the same flower onto the ends of the green stalks that I'd left waiting. They were done on a seperate layer so I was able to reduce the opacity slightly, which made them sit a little further back in the painting. The effect increases the focus on the flower with the butterfly on it.

The small white flowers were all done with 3 different stamp brushes that a created for a previous painting so yet more time was saved there. If I'd been using traditional methods and painted each flower individually it would have taken weeks to complete.

I can't say enough good thinks about digital art because it really does tick all the boxes. If you have any questions please let me know. Meanwhile, I will leave you with a link to the video. If you enjoy it please subscribe and another one will be along shortly.