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.