The thick braided muscles on his forearm tensed as he lifted the axe above his head.  There was a sharp crack as the wood split clean down the middle.  He leaned down to hoist the next log onto the thick tree stump.  Again he raised the axe.  Someone could have marked time by the rhythmic motions of his body and the distinct sounds of the woodcutting.

Tom had wielded an axe since his grandfather taught him when he was eight years old.  Now, at twenty-eight, he could keep a steady, constant pace for two hours.  After a ten minute rest he’d resume his work with the same vigor he’d had at the beginning of the day.

The August noonday sun was fierce, hardly casting a shadow.  Tom paused to wipe his brow across the short sleeve of his white cotton t-shirt.  A few yards to his left, tiny waves lapped against the rocks.  He was so used to the gurgling and sloshing of the river that silence in this place would have startled him.  A strong pine scent wafted from the short, knotted trees in the woods that hugged the contour of the shoreline.  Tom knew this land better than he did the inside of his house.  He spent most of his time outdoors.

He resumed the flow of the work, his mind clear.  Just as the axe reached its peak, held in momentary suspension before descent, there was a loud crack and the blade shivered as something metallic ricocheted from it.  “What the,” Tom swung the axe one-handed down to his side and swiveled round to cover his back, bringing the axe up to his chest, now holding its broad wooden handle with both hands, ready to swing in defense.

Another bullet whizzed past his right ear.  A man stepped out from behind a tree at the edge of the wood.  “Hi Tom,” he held a rifle, casually and confidently, aimed at Tom’s head.  He was thickset, bronze-red hair hanging loose around his shoulders.

Tom lowered the axe, gripping it with his right hand, “Hi Marty.”

“Told you I’d come find you when you came back.”

“I’ve been waiting.  Where you been?  I’ve been here for over a year.”

Marty held the gun steady, “I ought to  shoot you and be done with it.”

“How many times do I have to tell you it was an accident?”

“That might be, but you were drunk.”

“And you’re telling me you weren’t?”

“I wasn’t in the raft.  At least I had the common sense to know I couldn’t manoeuvre those rapids.”

“You mean you had to throw up and that’s why you got out and jumped on land while we were still moving down river.”

“You didn’t lose your sister and your fiance.”

“You don’t think I’ve been tortured these last five years?  Sally was my girl, you know I was gonna ask her to marry me.  And I’d known Emily since before I quit wearing diapers,” Tom slammed the axe blade into the wood stump and stood up straight to face Marty square on.  “Go ahead, do it,” he crossed his arms, “I’m waiting.”

Marty stood there, frozen, lips pressed thin.  His bright blue eyes were hardly visible his face was so distorted with bitterness.  The two men stood, one longing to pull the trigger, the other calmly awaiting his fate.

Marty threw the gun down.  It fired, exploding randomly into the air, echoing off the trees and rocky terrain.  “Damn you, I wish I could,” he turned and strode back into the woods.  He vanished, the gun on the ground the only evidence he had ever been there.  Tom noticed the sound of the river, wiped the sweat from his face again and picked up his axe to continue his rhythmical chopping.

Last week I sketched and inked a drawing of the Tower of London, scanned it into the computer and then painted it using Corel Painter Essentials and Adobe Photoshop.

This is the first time I’ve used Painter.  The program came as bundled software with the wacom graphic tablet I got long ago and I finally slipped the disk into the computer and installed it.

Painter provides brushes that make it possible to quickly build texture into a painting, which otherwise takes me more effort to create in Photoshop.  Painter also has a really nice color wheel that I find very intuitive and easy to use (I’m using version 3, the color wheel may have changed in version 4, it is said to have been improved).

After applying what might be called an ‘underpainting’ in Painter, I opened the file in Photoshop and continued painting, smoothing things, adding more emphasis to different colours and placing the final touches on it.  I use a really great set of brushes in Photoshop, that I bought from Portland Studios, designed by Justin Gerard.

I love painting digitally.  I don’t find that it takes less time or effort than painting with physical paints, but I love bright luminescent colors, and painting on the computer is very like painting with light.

When I was a kid, about 7 years old, I was often invited to go to a neighbor’s house to play.  My friends had a light box with a plastic sheet/screen on it that had tiny holes through it sized to hold colored plastic pegs.  The kit came with a variety of drawings etched in white on black paper.

The idea was to place the paper on the screen, push the colored pegs through the paper and the light behind, inside the box, made the peg light up.  Punching those colored pegs through that black paper and seeing them light up brilliantly in the otherwise dark room was something I still remember vividly.  The thrill of the finished ‘work of art’ gleaming in super bright colors!  I guess some things about a person just don’t change with time:  painting on the computer nowadays gives me similar delight.

Painting digitally is also a great way to investigate compositions and colors for a painting. I’ve used the computer to create a rough reference for a couple of the egg tempera paintings and also for some watercolor paintings.  It’s an excellent way to experiment and learn. From now on I plan to make a digital painting rough part of my routine work flow to use as a reference in painting an egg tempera or watercolor piece.

Here’s one of the sketches, from the movie Chain Reaction, I drew and inked using a Pentel brush pen.

'At Party' Brush Pen Ink Sketch

I’m trying my hand at pen and ink sketches. I have tended to avoid drawing people, so that’s mainly what I’m concentrating on just now. It’s turning out to be a great deal of fun, not to mention challenging.

I choose scenes from dvds for movies we’ve watched recently, so that I don’t spoil a movie for the next viewing of one that we haven’t seen in a while.  (I love movies). 

Sketching from dvds also provides a perfect opportunity to study the composition and layout of scenes and shots. How does the camera focus on the person in the scene? What is shown in addition? Where are the people placed and where are they relative to one another? There are so many tips to learn from directly just by doing this, which is great for honing skills to create works of art that excel in visual storytelling.

Here’s a closer look at the top sketches… (As usual, you can click on the images for larger view.)

In the past, I have often thought I should sketch, and on a couple of occasions I made feeble starts at it and gave up. This time I’m going all out – and the experience is so much fun that I can surely recommend doing it.  Even my previous short forays into sketching just for the sake of sketching have contributed to helping me get going this time. Every little bit helps….

If you were hesitating about whether ‘to sketch or not to sketch’, give it a try!

Just let go, don’t worry about bumbling it (you can always hide those – I do) and go for it. I’d love to hear from you if you sketch, or if you have any thoughts or suggestions on sketching.

A couple of weeks ago we were in town and we went to the Place du Bourg de Four (in Geneva, Switzerland) for a coffee.

Place du Bourg de Four in the Old Town Geneva, Switzerland

As we were leaving we noticed an ice cream bar and decided, on the spur of the moment, to get one.

Place du Bourg de Four. The ice cream bar is on the left in a row of cafes and shops.

They had these very cute napkins:

I brought a few different designs home for fun; it turns out there are a total of eight different designs in this series.

On the back of the napkins is a link for the design company Camal.

This week I’m back to painting in watercolor – the next batch of drawings are ready.  You can see the last set of paintings for the Gex book in the post, “Watercolor Paintings of Scenes in the Pays de Gex, France“.

Drawings for book about Pays de Gex, France, ready for painting in watercolor

My sister wrote me an email a couple of days ago about the digital paintings posted in Unexpected Development.  She said:  “I’m not sure I really understand how it was created, but I’ll read it properly again later.”  I didn’t explain how I painted them in that post, so I thought I’d do that here.

A very important accessory for painting on the computer is a Wacom tablet, or some device that allows you to use a pen on a pad in much the same way you would a pen on paper.  This is a photo of the Wacom Intuos 3 tablet I use.

Wacom Intuos 3 Tablet

You can see the pen in the photo; the pen tip facing up and the eraser (just like you’d expect) is at the other end.  The pen has pressure sensitivity, so that the harder you press, the thicker the pen or pencil or paint stroke is.  The sensitivity of this response can be adjusted to however you want it.  For example, if you want to have a quick flow from a thin line to a thicker one, you can set it to be real sensitive to slightly harder pressures to create that thicker line.  And you can set a maximum thickness you want it to go.  It can also be made to respond to tilting the pen as you draw, so that it responds very much like a pencil or paintbrush would when you tilt them.

If you want to draw something, you just draw with the pen on the sensitive pad in the middle of the Wacom tablet and it comes up on the computer screen.  To erase, you flip the pen around and use it just like an eraser. The pads come in a range of sizes, from 4″ x 6″ up to 12″ x 19″; the one shown above is 4″ x 6″.

The Wacom tablet works with Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many other software applications.  I’m using Adobe Photoshop.  I saved jpeg snapshots of some of the stages as I painted the Horse Chestnut, so I can use these to show a little how it was done.  I don’t have anything saved from the earlier part of creating it, but here’s the first snapshot I have.

1st Stage of the Digital Painting Of Horse Chestnut

I sketched the horse chestnut using a fine simple line that varied a little with pressure applied to the tablet.  And then I applied color with different brushes.

2nd Stage of the Digital Painting of Horse Chestnut

The choice of brushes in Photoshop is a huge topic so far as I can tell.  The essence of it is that you can choose the brush type, size, and variation of brushstroke.

There seem to be an infinite number of ways to arrange a paintbrush.  The idea is that you choose a pattern and size and when you paint with that pattern it repeats itself over and over again as you drag the brush across the page.  You can choose from a set of patterns that are delivered with Photoshop, but you can also add patterns of your own.  And these can be anything, and I mean anything, you want.

3rd Stage of the Digital Painting of the Horse Chestnut

The amazing thing is, that when you choose a pattern, let’s say of what appears to be completely random dots arranged in a swirl, and then you drag it across the page, it can create a brush stroke that is totally unexpected.  By selecting and adjusting, what is at first, a dazzling number of attributes, you can dramatically change the way a particular pattern displays itself when painted on the page.  This means that there really are no limits to what can be achieved, but it also requires lots of experimentation to become familiar to the point of making the computer brush more intuitive to use.

4th Stage of the Digital Painting of the Horse Chestnut: leaf closeup

Depending on the type of pattern and attributes you choose, the paintbrush can be made to look like airbrush, watercolor, pastel, oil, acrylic, and anything you care to invent.  Figuring out which brushes do what can be quite the inventive part.

6th Stage of the Digital Painting of the Horse Chestnut: leaf close-up

Colors and brushstrokes are added layer on layer just like with traditional painting, until eventually the final painting emerges:

Digital Painting of Horse Chestnut

I’m excited about using the computer because it allows me to experiment with different mediums, such as pastel, oil, airbrush, for example, that I could not otherwise use.  My intention is to create art using traditional artistic principles, through the medium of the computer, to produce paintings and sketches in much the same way I would if I were working directly on paper.   As I learn more I’ll share my discoveries here.  I’d love to hear any comments you have.

Following a new style, here are a couple of sketches by Nat Wildish: one of snow-covered Jura mountains, the other of Virginia Woolf.

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