Jasmine (our African Grey parrot) and I used to go for long walks in the Gex countryside.  We saw all sorts of things and took loads of photos, which have since become a source of reference shots for paintings for the Gex book.  Well, I took the photos and did the walking, and Jazzy sat and climbed around in her backpack cage on my back, eating and looking around.

During one of our jaunts we came across some cows being transported to the fields for grazing.  During the winter the cows around Gex are kept in or near the barn, and during the late spring and summer they’re brought out to the pastures. ‘Cow-Bus’, (13″ x 10″) seems a good name for this painting.

It was fun painting this.  Jazzy and I had a great time out that day.  It was so pretty everywhere, spring was vibrant with bright new flowers, butterflies, bees, insects buzzing everywhere, fresh air, and sunshine.

Jazzy was chatting away as usual, making impressive hawk sounds and generally commenting on things.  She liked to chat, sometimes she chatted in a continuous flow of non-stop, almost unintelligible words.  One time we were sitting at a bench and she was doing this. Someone got out of a parked car and crossed the street to ask if I had a radio on, and then discovered Jasmine.  Of course, Jazzy was delighted because then she was admired and soon someone else came and she had a crowd talking to her.  From then on, whenever she chatted like that (which was much of the time) we called her chatter: ‘radio Jasmine’.

Here you can see a more close-up view of the tractor window.  There’s quite a bit of detail in this painting.

I’ve decided that I like detail, and perhaps more of a graphic-type look, rather than an overt so-called ‘painterly’ look, which often seems to translate to a more sophisticated look. I’ve had quite some difficulty trying to understand what style paintings I want to create, because I admire many different styles.  But I think I do best with a simpler expression, and it has been such a good feeling, almost a relief, to discover this.

This painting was painted using Corel Painter 11.

Yesterday I finished another painting for the Gex book. Walking uphill on one of the main streets in Gex, there are wall-to-wall two to three story buildings hugging the sidewalk on either side of the street.  So it’s quite unexpected when, on the left, a small square opens up, and it’s possible to see the Jura mountains in the distance and in the square there’s a fountain with running water.

I finally succumbed and tried Corel Painter 11, and this scene is painted with Corel Painter watercolor brushes.  It is really a very nice way to paint digitally.  I don’t find it easier than painting with normal paint brushes and pots of paint.  In fact for the style I’ve used in painting the Gex fountain, I find it’s much more time-consuming to paint digitally than with watercolor on paper.

This is the photo used as reference:

Gex Town Fountain

The ability to experiment without worrying about the cost of materials or if the painting will be ruined, allows much more room to let it flow and try different things. I tend to spend more time going after colors and light that I want to see in the painting.

It’s very nice not to have washing or clearing up afterward. This makes it much easier to start painting even if there is only a short interval of time available for painting.  I’m much more inclined to turn on the computer during those times than I am to dig out all the paints and brushes for a painting session.

When painting digitally, I paint pretty much how I would on paper, building up from washes to more detail.  I saved backups when I finished an area, so it doesn’t demonstrate much gradual buildup within any given area, but below is a sequence showing the progression in terms of which sections I tackled in what order (click on image to enlarge).

I highly recommend Corel Painter 11 for anyone wanting to paint digitally.  It’s potential seems limitless, and it’s very interesting to experiment to see what can be done with it.

Do you like digital artwork, or do you prefer traditionally created artwork? Which do you prefer to see? Which do you prefer to create? Why?  I’d love to know your thoughts.

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

‘River of Tulips’ started as a 16 x 10″ (41 x 25 cm) egg tempera painting. I spent many hours of labor over the details of the tulips. But I remained unhappy with the result. So I took a photograph of the painting and, last week, painted over it digitally until I arrived at a painting that now conveys the idea I originally had in mind.

Digital Painting of 'River of Tulips' by Nat Wildish

I could easily paint on the original egg tempera painting with egg tempera paint until I arrived at the result you see here. Maybe one day I will!

Here’s the original egg tempera painting of ‘River of Tulips’:

Original Egg Tempera Painting of 'River of Tulips' by Nat Wildish

I can see merits in both versions of the painting.  Which one do you like best, and why? I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Thanks.

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!

"Portrait of a Horse" in egg tempera by Nat Wildish

Selling art seems, at first glance, to be a fairly easy thing to accomplish.  But there are loads of things to learn.  This last couple of weeks I’ve been concentrating on understanding how to make prints.

I’ll have two sources of artwork for prints: my egg tempera paintings and digital artwork that I paint on the computer.  The egg tempera paintings can either be scanned or photographed in order to create prints; I’ve chosen to photograph them.  The digital paintings need to be created, right from the start, at the correct size and resolution in order to print properly.  It doesn’t work to paint them on a ’small canvas’ document and then expect them to print larger.  And scaling the document below 75% or above 120% digitally doesn’t generally give good results.

This means that right up front, before I create the artwork, I need to decide what size prints to produce.  I’ve spent the last week reading four really good books on the process of printing, considering all the options, and how to process the digital files to be sure of color consistency and sharpness of the print.

I’ve been able to find out how to color-manage the whole process, from the camera, the monitor, right through to the printer, and how to either work with a print service provider, or to print them myself with a printer at home. I’ve found out what papers and inks to use, what calibration and profiling equipment is best, how to process Camera Raw digital files, and how to use Photoshop to implement the whole process.

Access to the online library Safari Books Online, created in 2001 by O’Reilly Media, Inc. and The Pearson Technology Group, has enabled me to thoroughly and quickly research the subject.  This service is fantastic.  For a monthly subscription of $42, it allows unlimited reading of all of their books and training videos, or for $22 they allow ten books per month.  They offer a great deal at several different subscription rates, click here for more details about the subscriptions.

There’s no obligation to continue the subscription beyond one month, and it can be canceled at any time, so long as it’s cancelled before the start of the next monthly billing cycle.  They have loads of really great informative books; buying each individual book would incur a very large expense.  There’s a good introduction to the service in a review written a year ago on developerlife.com – reviews.  This helped me to get a better understanding of how the service worked, and then I looked into the details on the Safari Books Online site itself before subscribing.

"Maldives Palm" in egg tempera by Nat Wildish

I usually take notes when I read textbooks or informative books.  This allows me to quickly access the information I find most helpful in a book, in a layout easy for me to quickly scan visually.  It means that, in the future, I don’t have to sift through the entire contents of a book to find the details that I want to use.  And while I’m taking notes, it allows me to process and understand what I’m reading at much greater depth.  I find it a very efficient and effective way to work. Doing things this way, I rarely need to keep a book once I’ve read it.

I love the idea of being able to access this information online without having to waste the resources it would take to have that book in print, delivered or bought from a store and then to not need it after reading it for a few days.  It’s a much more environmentally friendly way to go about things, and one that my way of working naturally accommodates.

The Safari Books Online has been vital in enabling me to access really good books on a subject that is otherwise extremely difficult to get a good grasp of.  And until I read all four books that I chose to read on the subject of printing, I really didn’t feel equipped to move forward with the process.  The Safari Books Online service also provides what they call ‘Rough Cuts’, in which authors provide the text of a book while they’re writing it.  One of the books I read, which was absolutely brilliant, was a Rough Cut for a book that isn’t due to be printed until July of this year, 2009.

These are the four books I would recommend on the process of taking a digital file from creation to print:

1. Inkjet Tips and Techniques An Essential Printing Resource for Photographers by Andrew Darlow
2. Mastering Digital Color: A Photographer’s and Artist’s Guide to Controlling Color by David Saffir
3. Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications by Claudia McCue (this is a ‘Rough Cut’, due to be published in July 2009)
4. CMYK 2.0: A Cooperative Workflow for Photographers, Designers, and Printers by Rick McCleary

Safari Books Online cover many topics and are constantly expanding their library.  Searching their library is a really good way to find excellent books on different subjects.  And at the bottom of each book description they also include Amazon.com customer reviews, which is a really excellent way to gauge the relevance of a book to your needs.

Next, I’m going to read a book specifically on Digital Painting, “Photoshop Studio with Bert Monroy: Digital Painting” by Bert Monroy; then I’ll read a couple of books about digital SLR cameras, and about the one we have in particular, so that I can competently take photos of the artwork.

After that, well… I’ll see if there’s anything else relevant to my art goals.

"Fisherman's Bastion, Budapest" egg tempera painting by Nat Wildish

I hope to have most of the research of this type finished within the next month.  And then I can really get to work on the art, which is, after all, the most enticing part.  I hope that sharing some of my process in researching and in particular the books I found on printing can be of help to you.  If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions I’d be very happy to hear them.

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.

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.

(click on the title for the full article and comments)

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

(click on the title for the full article and comments)