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 the beginning of May there was a holiday here in France and we took the opportunity to go to Divonne for a photo shoot.  We discovered that very few people were out and about and there weren’t many cars on the road either.  It was a great day for taking loads of photos around the place.

I’m considering doing a series of paintings of Divonne and so I have started with the Tourist Office.  It’s in a pretty area with a stream flowing nearby and the Casino is across the street.

The painting was done in Adobe Photoshop, using brushes in very much the same way I would paint with normal brushes on paper.  Painting digitally gives access to different styles of painting that I couldn’t achieve easily, if at all, with egg tempera.

Divonne is a popular place for tourists.  There is very pretty countryside all around, the Divonne lake is near the town, and the town has small shops, restaurants and cafes.  (If you’d like to see what the Divonne lake is like, I’ve written about it with lots of photos: you can see them by clicking:  here.)  On Sundays there’s a market from early morning until around 1:30 and there are loads of people.  It’s great fun!

We go for lots of long walks, especially at weekends.  On one such trek we found ourselves under the piercing gaze of one of the local hawks.

If we had been small and lightweight, we wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Instead we had a great time watching him fly slowly over.

It almost seemed like he was showing off for us.

He swooped down, stayed low, and then, when he figured he’d best be getting on, he was gone.

These great photos were taken by Tony (to see his blog click here on: Song For Jasmine.

I’ve been working hard to learn Adobe Photoshop, color management, the printing process, and how to photograph art originals to produce fine art prints.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I subscribed to Safari Books Online in order to read the books I needed on these subjects.

I did read all the books I mentioned in that post, and then I also worked through another book, which I recommend very highly to anyone who wants a thorough foundation in using Adobe Photoshop and how to build an efficient workflow:  “Real World Adobe Photoshop CS3: Industrial-Strength Production Techniques” by David Blatner, Conrad Chavez, and Bruce Fraser.

I continued to take notes, as I described before, so that in the future I can go back to my notebook to see how to do specific tasks.  I set myself a tight schedule and was very relieved when I finally finished this area of study, and I’m very pleased with the information I learned.  It has enabled me to find out what equipment is necessary, and how to use it, in order to be able to produce reproductions of the artwork as prints.

At Safari Books Online, I also discovered and watched all of Ron Lemen’s video lessons on how to draw and paint, using both traditional mediums and Photoshop.  I thought the videos were fantastic.  I learned loads from them.  This YouTube video below, shows excerpts from the videos:

So I studied a large number of books, watched videos, gained access to books that were not yet published, for timely information, and was able to look into a much larger number of books to see if I was interested in reading them in more detail: all for a $42 month subscription.  Safari Books Online allows you to deactivate your account, so that it will not continue to be billed into the next month.  Later, you can reactivate your account at any time.  There are no penalties or fees for activating/deactivating the account.

I had the subscription for one month, and was able to fully complete my research and studies in that time.  It was a very pleasant experience, though it was hard work. I was almost sad to deactivate the account; it felt like I was saying goodbye to an old friend.  In the future, when I have another research project I won’t bother going to bookstores in search of books, I’ll go straight to their site.

I’m enthusiastic about the Safari Books Online service, and have mentioned it again on DweezelJazz Art blog, just because I found it so useful and thought you might too.  I’m very cautious with subscribing to services on the web, and it’s great to find something that has been well thought out and is a pleasure to use and, very importantly, easy and hassle-free to stop when you want to.

Gradually I’m bringing together all the facets of creating art that I need in order to go forward with my aspirations.  Now, enough of the studying!  It’s fun, but I much prefer to draw and paint.  And that’s what’s next on the agenda.  My goal is to produce art and beautiful pictures that make me, and hopefully others, feel good, adding a little bit more fun and joy into the world, maybe just a tiny spark of that thrill that comes with watching a hawk effortlessly glide on the air currents.

Well! I had plans to write a blog post these last few days, but they were foiled. I was preparing the photos for it when it occurred to me how much more effective it would be to have a slide show of groups of those photos. Hence the hold up: I’m learning how to do that.

Since January I’ve been learning how to use the Adobe software programs using the Total Training Online Courses. I’ve been learning how to use Photoshop, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver and in the future I’ll add studying Illustrator and probably Adobe Acrobat. The courses show through video how to use the programs. The instructors are great and make it much easier to learn these very complex programs. Whenever I leaf through instructional books on these programs my eyes glaze over and become completely blurred without focus. I take notes as I watch the videos and then later I have the information in a format I can quickly identify and relate to.

It’s great having access to all the Adobe software courses because it allows access to all the information. And if any new courses are added these are also available for as long as the subscription lasts. It’s much cheaper than buying the DVDs for the specific courses. A couple of years ago I bought a set of DVDs on InDesign and I discovered that after taking notes from them I no longer wanted to spend the time it takes to watch the videos a second time. Having the DVDs was really no extra benefit to me. The online subscription gives me access I otherwise could not hope to gain if I had to buy the DVDs.

This is taking rather a lot of time however. I had a structure in mind about which lessons I’d do first and what I needed in order to progress with the art. All those great ideas have flown to the wind. I started with Photoshop. Then I realized I wanted to add another gallery for Digital Art to my website. But I would need to redo my website in a format that is easy to edit and add to…I started the Dreamweaver lessons, which are really great. This weekend I had the idea to post an article about how I paint with egg tempera… and so… I started watching the Flash course videos with a view to preparing that blog post.

I’m having loads of fun with it, and as a result I’ve ended up making good progress in most of the programs I want to learn. My days of systematic, ordered approach appear to be over!

These courses are giving me more confidence to move forward with my plans for the art. I hope, in time, to produce digital art as well as the egg tempera paintings. I’d like to create short image-dominated books; for example, I want to paint many of the photos I took of Annecy, France, and include text next to the paintings and print this as a booklet. I’ll start by using the DweezelJazz blog posts about Annecy as a basis for that project. And as I hone my skills in writing and telling stories, I’d like to illustrate those. So there are many things I’m hoping to do, but it takes time to learn the tools required in order to create these things.

I think I’ve learned enough about Flash to create the slide show/movie to demonstrate how I approach painting with egg tempera. Stay tuned for the next DweezelJazz blog post to see how it turns out with the making of a Flash movie.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Exploration into digital painting. Here are two digital paintings by Nat Wildish: one of the sunset up at Col de la Faucille, France, and the other of a horse chestnut.

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