Hi all,
The digital painting is still going well although I do have a concern. I love painting digitally but I have a feeling it is affecting my eyes. To try and reduce the problem I'm doing two things. Firstly, when I do a new painting I get rid of the white background straight away. I choose a bland colour and leave that in place until I change it for the proper background when I paint it. Here is a painting of some peacock butterflies on an aster type plant.
I made short video of how I painted this image and it shows how I used a bland background at the start. Here is the video.
If you enjoy it please consider subscribing, it would be most appreciated.
The second thing I'm doing to save my eyes is to do a bit more tradditional artwork. I don't think I'll be going back to watercolours but I'm going to give pen and ink and graphite another go.
I did a quick ink drawing of a partridge to see how it felt after amost a year of digital art and the experience was positive. Here is the drawing, nothing special but it didn't hurt my eyes at all.
If you have any comments please fire away and I'll be back soon with another butterfly painting.
I have done another butterfly painting in what is going to be a series of four. In my last post I showed you the first one of some painted ladies and I thought it was my best painting so far. Well I think this one is going to run it a close second.
The butterflies are good, but I also like the scabious flowers and the buttercups. It is beyond my wildest dreams to be able to paint images like this and it is all down to doing it digitally. The combination of ipad and an app called Procreate make it all so achievable. I would love to know what you think, please feel free to comment.
If you would like to see how I painted this image, which includes the copies use of stamp brushes, I have done a short video which shows how it was done.
If you enjoy watching the video please consider subscribing, it cost nothing and if you don't click the bell icon you won't be bothered with reminders. The third in the series will be along shortly
Hi all,
I have just finished the best painting I have ever done and I'm very pleased. I painted it on the ipad using an app called Procreate and it came out very well indeed. I might be biased of course so without further ado I will show you the painting and you can judge it's merits for yourself.
There you have it, three painted lady butterflies feasting on an imaginary plant that resembles cow parsley. The reference photo was one that I took in the late 90's when we had an invasion of painted ladies. This butterfly is not native to Great Britain and usually only a few make an appearance from overseas.
I painted the butterflies first to make sure I could do them justice and then I painted the flowers on a separate layer. They were painted using a couple of stamp brushes that I created myself and it made the job a lot quicker. Painting each one of those small flowers seperately would have been tedious to say the least.
Here is the reference photo.
I increased the distance between the butterflies to improve the composition and I changed the flowers. The vebena bonariensis that are shown in the photo are nice enough, but I didn't like the combination of orange and purple.
If you would like to see a short movie of me doing this painting, here is a link to a short video I made showing how it was done.
Any comments or question about the painting will be welcome and if you enjoyed the video please subscribe for future offerings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
