Jumping back into drawing/painting -- with a twist.

reply to post by InTheFlesh1980


I tried piano, guitar, sax, even drums -- with musical instruments, I was never able to get beyond the mechanics of playing the right note, to playing music.

Well, you have skills for sure. The fur you do is really good.

I wish I could afford the really nice tablets, mine is a cheap chinese knockoff that is croaking on me. Spend more time undoing strokes my tablet did on it's own than actually "painting" these days. Glad I started my holiday stuff early this year lol.

reply to post by SkepticOverlord


SkepticOverlord

Told you I would put newer work of mine on your site

ON ATS

did you make your avatar BTW

Brotherman
did you make your avatar BTW

Yes. I made that in Poser.


Well… the kind UPS man delivered my Wacom Cintiq 13HD today, and after clearing a few things, I had a chance to dive in for about an hour before I left the office.

The vast time-consuming bottomless pit that is Adobe Photoshop pressure-sensitive natural media "brushes" is mind-boggling. There's a wet oil brush that picks up some of the wet oil paint on the "canvas" as you paint… and the harder you press on the stylus, the more of the color is "picked up." I played with a soft pastel that "wears down" as you use it, then all you do is rotate the stylus to use the "sharpened" part (same with charcoal).

The tablet is near-perfect. There's almost no noticeable gap between the nib and the screen, very well-built. The tactile feel is very nearly the same as fine markers or drawing pens on a cold-press bristol.

So rather than get pulled into the never-ending hole of brush presets, I picked two stock items, an HB pencil for dark, and a pastel pencil for light, and started a light/shadow study of a Sedona rock formation.

This is about 45 minutes, and only represents about 15% of the entire image. This has the exact look of pencil/charcoal and conté crayon work… without the cleanup.

Once I'm finished, I'll try a pastel painting over this.

At first I thought the small screen size might be an issue, but the resolution is stunning (about 160 pixels per inch), it looks like drawing on natural media… in fact, I found myself avoiding resting my hand on what I had just drawn. After I figured out how to quickly toggle all the palettes in and out, the screen size is fine… if not ideal for casual drawing/painting.

I'm hooked.

reply to post by SkepticOverlord


that is incredibly done artist to artist im not really sure what to say as I am not a critic and your shiz is awesome. Do you or have you ever done work without digital, I am sure you have and am certain it is pretty damn rad!

reply to post by Brotherman


In the opening post I talked about my natural media work (long ago), and there's a couple examples here.

reply to post by SkepticOverlord


I did see that when you originally posted that, they are awesome. I guess what I meant to say is do you have anywhere online of a more complete portfolio, I get excited sometimes when I see other artists work that spans over many medias and many years

reply to post by Brotherman


I have surviving work from 2 children's books I'm going to put somewhere… one pen & ink, the other the style from that previous post.

Everything else (pastel paintings, charcoal drawings, pen & ink) was on 35mm slides that have been lost in a move long ago.

I had a smallish 12x6 charcoal and white conté (on gray pastel paper) quick sketch of a row of old 18-wheeler trailers in a junkyard, each had been severely damaged by a low overpass. At the time I intended it to be the inspiration for a large pastel painting, but on a whim I entered it in a regional show -- it won some level of award each time I entered it. It only took me about 10-15 minutes.

After some trial and error -- and a Diamond USB-to-Video adapter for a third monitor on a Mac laptop -- here's the "studio" set up.


The Cintiq has a nice "display toggle" function that temporarily has the tablet function as a blind tablet for another monitor… that makes it easy to "reach up" to the big monitor and change brushes, select colors, etc.

Notice the distinct lack of pastel/charcoal dust, oil paint tubes, sketch books, pencils, rags, blenders, etc. Mrs. Overlord likes that!

reply to post by SkepticOverlord


thats pretty rad dude alot more then most of us have

reply to post by Brotherman


It's not as opulent as one might think. The laptop is a used 2-year old MacBook pro (with some upgrades of my own), the big monitor is refurbished off Ebay, and thanks to using my laptop at the office, I didn't need to shell out my own cash for Photoshop.

Anyway…

I'm still struggling with more complex color work using the built-in natural media brushes of Photoshop. The brushes weren't "behaving" as I expected. So I've lately been working on going through all the settings/presets for brushes trying to create my own Conte crayon and soft pastels -- both pick up a minor amount of the colors underneath depending on pressure. It's that subtle mixing that I'm missing.

It's quite a leap to try and jump back into art/drawing exclusively on an active tablet.

Awesome stuff, everything looks great, and the pug looks real nice. Im wondering if you are considering ways to ever print your work if youd ever want to hang it our give it to friends and relatives, is there ways to, with high quality and perhaps on nice choice of medium to print your digital works?

ImaFungi
Awesome stuff, everything looks great, and the pug looks real nice. Im wondering if you are considering ways to ever print your work if youd ever want to hang it our give it to friends and relatives, is there ways to, with high quality and perhaps on nice choice of medium to print your digital works?

I have a Canon Pro9000 large-format inkjet printer a bought long ago for photography, it does a great job with natural-media-looking images on watercolor paper, or bristol cut-to-size.

In-between all the other things going on, I found some time to experiment with all the natural media brushes, focusing on dry media -- pencils and pastels. While the myriad of tweaks one can make to brush presets can be mind boggling… the most important thing is the pen-pressure sensitivity in the Wacom control panel. Setting it to stiff made all the difference with subtle scrapes of the simulated pastel.

Here's one of our other pugs, Byron.

He's the "complicated" pug who's definitely a momma's boy, very athletic for a pug, and has the most expressive face I've ever seen in any dog.


Here's a close up showing the simulated pastel, on simulated textured paper.

Started a Tumblr blog artbyazbill.tumblr.com that will contain a little more detail about the process than what I'll post here.

I love watching artists create.

The ones that film themselves doing their thing,
are just ... the best.

But nothing beats the ones that use the pen,
it's like watching a Tea-Master serve, or
an Olympic fencer win.

I think the video of the creation of a piece of
art can be just as, if not more, valuable than
the finished piece itself.

Mike Grouchy

Thats really incredible! Love the pug.. and the eye is really intriguing to me.


Mr. Bill.. I have a suggestion. You should do more children's books.. but with a little twist. My youngest ( a late life baby) is just 8 years old as of Saturday. She is gifted and I have her in several different curriculum programs.. that are not very visually appealing to her. She mentions it often.. but there is little out there for her age group coupled with her gifts. She is also a hellacious gamer.. and hung up on graphics. VERY picky. I push the written word and paper books ( she calls it "analog work") on her in equal doses as her digital. Again, the problem is its not very visually appealing to her pickiness and need for that intense visual stimulation. Have you ever considered making a children's book geared toward these super intense visual kids.. who crave detail and realism even in their surreal material? Hard to explain I guess.. you know, on the lines of Geiger or Vallejo.. without the gratuitous boobs and bulges???

reply to post by Advantage


Funny. When I converted my colored pencil book, "I Saw A Strange Little Man," to CD-ROM, it got some really good reviews along those lines back in 1994 (when it was released). Here's one from Amazon…

I Saw A Strange Little Man

This has got to be one of the strangest games I've ever played, and I mean that in a good way. It's like a child's abstract, fantasy world come to life. Everything about this game will active your child's imagination. Its interactiveness will also delight your child's senses, further driving his/her imagination to the max.

The graphics for this game are were great for its time. But as of now? I would say that it has aged pretty well. The richness of the graphics' color saturation that is scattered all over the place is still quite pleasing to the eyes.

The strangeness of the game's storyline fairly complements the game's graphics: their strangeness combine to create a wonderful surrealistic masterpiece. I can't remember much of the game's story as it has been more than a decade since I last played this game (I also lost the game CD and still can't find where I last put it), but I wouldn't want to give away much of the story anyway. All that I can remember is that you are out to find something surreal and magical, and have to go through a lot of pleasing sensory experiences in order to that magical something. It's akin to exploring Salvador Dali's artworks, and I mean literally exploring. Just imagine yourself exploring everything inside Dali's "The Persistence of Memory", and to see, hear, etc. everything that is inside that painting. It's almost synesthetic in a way.

That is how "I Saw A Strange Little Man" is. This game is wonderful for not only children, but for people of all ages. One is never to old to visit the land of dreams and make-believe, and indulge in all that is has to offer.

I used Raydream Designer to create a 3D world that complimented the story. Readers were to explore the world to fully understand the meaning of the 12-page illustrated story. The CD-ROM was built for Windows 3.1 and Mac OS7, so it doesn't run on anything any more.

SkepticOverlord
reply to post by Advantage

 

Funny. When I converted my colored pencil book, "I Saw A Strange Little Man," to CD-ROM, it got some really good reviews along those lines back in 1994 (when it was released). Here's one from Amazon…

I Saw A Strange Little Man

This has got to be one of the strangest games I've ever played, and I mean that in a good way. It's like a child's abstract, fantasy world come to life. Everything about this game will active your child's imagination. Its interactiveness will also delight your child's senses, further driving his/her imagination to the max.

The graphics for this game are were great for its time. But as of now? I would say that it has aged pretty well. The richness of the graphics' color saturation that is scattered all over the place is still quite pleasing to the eyes.

The strangeness of the game's storyline fairly complements the game's graphics: their strangeness combine to create a wonderful surrealistic masterpiece. I can't remember much of the game's story as it has been more than a decade since I last played this game (I also lost the game CD and still can't find where I last put it), but I wouldn't want to give away much of the story anyway. All that I can remember is that you are out to find something surreal and magical, and have to go through a lot of pleasing sensory experiences in order to that magical something. It's akin to exploring Salvador Dali's artworks, and I mean literally exploring. Just imagine yourself exploring everything inside Dali's "The Persistence of Memory", and to see, hear, etc. everything that is inside that painting. It's almost synesthetic in a way.

That is how "I Saw A Strange Little Man" is. This game is wonderful for not only children, but for people of all ages. One is never to old to visit the land of dreams and make-believe, and indulge in all that is has to offer.

I used Raydream Designer to create a 3D world that complimented the story. Readers were to explore the world to fully understand the meaning of the 12-page illustrated story. The CD-ROM was built for Windows 3.1 and Mac OS7, so it doesn't run on anything any more.

Pretty darned cool.. I had no idea! Okay.. time for a retool and update! This kind of thing..

see, hear, etc. everything that is inside that painting

Pretty well exactly what Im talking about!

Working on a new painting… with some new stuff.

My Tumblr

I scanned an old piece of Canson pastel paper I had, and am using that as the background for a new piece, a pretty woman emerging from a pool.


This is attempting to simulate a charcoal and Conté crayon study. Typically (way back in the day) I'd do a few of these, transfer a final to tracing paper, then transfer to the pastel paper for the painting. But with Photoshop, I'll just keep it as the top layer for reference while I do the pastel work.