Cylinders!

Hah, no energy to think of a catchy title. More digital rendering/form study practice. This time, after I finished the contour lines of the shapes, I blocked in a solid flat color into the shapes and then used a clipping layer so that I didn’t have to worry about staying in the lines. I started the background as a midtone, so that the highlights would be extra satisfying.

Also – super helpful to make the light source off canvas to the left (though it was flipped most of while I was working, so I think of it as to the right still…). Who knew that a further away light source would make it easier to reason about? You know, rather than trying to stick it into the middle of the canvas, like last night.

Started at 9pm (because I wanted to paint my nails instead of make art – priorities!), worked til 10pm. Watched Critical Role live stream on Twitch while I painted. Still watching it, but I need to go get ready for bed in 15 minutes.

Lessons about cropping images were learned. I used the same Photoshop file as yesterday (just a new layer group), but apparently last night I cropped the original PSD to 850 pixels wide and, sorrow of sorrows, saved the PSD after making the crop for a web JPG save. I didn’t notice until at the very end when I went to crop the image for this post. Boooo.

850px is my arbitrary landscape width I crop to for the blog. For the original PSD I try to work above 1200 pixels wide at a minimum, since my featured images for posts is 1200 by 640px. Before I was drawing at 5×7 inches, 300dpi, to get into a good habit, since whenever I work at some smaller size (because I assume I’ll never want to print my practice paintings), then I regret. Like when I painted the ‘mask of a muse‘ painting of my logo for my first post of the blog reboot. That painting was “Just practice”, so the canvas was 1000px by 1000 pixels, and thus I can’t make a print of it (it was *barely* big enough to use on a small business card, ::sigh::).

Anyway, end result I had to – after finishing painting – expand the canvas to 1200 and then add filler paint in the background.

I have my cheat sheet notepad file for cropping images, if a behind the scenes “how Beth keeps her blog content organized” is interesting:

I enjoy a combination of information and chaos in any documentation I create. It reflects the real world, haha.

‘Til next time. <3