Digital Painting
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Practicing in Between (Part 1 & 2)
Winter’s begun and the longest night is here. I’m ready for fresh starts, a new year, and lengthening daylight slowly inching back towards spring. I’ve been practicing art quite a bit, and am so close to filling two sketchbooks: a multimedia one and a smaller drawing one (hopefully a sketchbook share video is coming in the near future 🤞). Today I have 25 sketchbook pages to share in this post (!!!). And I came up with the idea for an ongoing series that I’ve just begun, with a new original character!
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Finished painting: Otherworldly Winds
Finished, yay! This painting started as an intuitive painting, so the color palette is a bit strange to say the least. I tried to wrestle it into something cohesive, but it seemed to slide out of my grasp and become a bright, tangled mess. Still, I’m very happy with how this turned out. Happy enough that I might order some 6×8″ prints of it for fun.
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Petals (Otherworldly Winds WIP part 3)
This digital painting is taking way longer than I anticipated! I’m hoping the weekend will give me enough time to finish it up. Of course, it just had to be on one of my “practice size” canvases (2000p by 2500px). At least it’s at 300 dpi and still big enough to print a 6×8″ art print, if I decide to do that. Though a little cropping on the sides and bottom will occur. Whenever I create a new canvas and think “oh this will just be for practice, let’s keep the file size smaller” I should just not do that.
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Starry Skies (Otherworldly Winds WIP part 2)
I’m not sure if I’d still call this an intuitive painting, now that it’s becoming more realistic. Can a painting be more realistic and still be intuitive? Are all paintings intuitive to one degree or another? All I know is I’m frustrated I had to cut myself short (again) and leave it unfinished! Grrr! But, still, progress! Shiny glowing stars! I’ll take victories where I can get them.
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Otherworldly Winds: Work In Progress
Here is one way to balance art and the rest of daily life: just find a stopping point after an hour and say “good enough for now, the rest will be waiting tomorrow” and cut yourself some slack. I have not been having a good day and was tempted to check out and just read in bed wrapped in a blanket nest. Instead, I turned to that form of art that is always a warm embrace for me: intuitive painting.
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Digital sketching progress
I think daily practice is starting to pay off a little. Two months ago, whenever I tried to sketch directly in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet, it felt so awkward; I scrapped drawings a few times in frustration. Tonight I worked while using a photo reference, but the sketching felt must easier. I was able to softly erase lines like a kneaded eraser, layering up an under sketch until I had the line I wanted. Then I would solidify those lines to be darker while erasing the rest. I worked on a single sketch layer. I also really like making the background layer something other than pure white – it…
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Digital painting practice: coffee and sweets
Living out my coffee shop fantasies through painting. Or maybe I’m painting my baking aspirations, in the case of the cookie. Tonight was another night where I had about an hour to paint. I found some photos on Pexels to study and then went to work, while watching the latest Critical Role episode.
