![Digital painting of various cylinder shapes rotated in space with shading](https://images.delightedmuse.com/uploads/2021/02/2021-02-04-cylinders-featured-image.jpg)
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.
![Digital painting of various cylinder shapes rotated in space with shading](https://images.delightedmuse.com/uploads/2021/02/2021-02-04-cylinders-850.jpg)
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:
![Screen cap of a notepad file showing my common crop sizes](https://images.delightedmuse.com/uploads/2021/02/2021-02-04-crop-size-guide.jpg)
I enjoy a combination of information and chaos in any documentation I create. It reflects the real world, haha.
‘Til next time. <3
![Photo of a sketchbook with markers and pens next to the sketchbook, and two drawings collaged on top](https://images.delightedmuse.com/uploads/2021/02/2021-02-05-sketchbook-4-featured-image.jpg)
![Digital painting of boxes rotated in space](https://images.delightedmuse.com/uploads/2021/02/2021-02-03-boxes-featured-image.jpg)