Tag: Painter Digital Art

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Cartoon art Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Polar (Bipolar)

Polar (Bipolar)

Digital illustration in Corel Painter started from scanned sketchy ideas drawn on the back of a receipt sitting on the kitchen table.

This week’s Illustration Friday challenge is “Polar.” I first thought of polar bears of course, but I did a polar bear illustration before for Illo Friday when the word was DANCE. Next stop on the train of though was “bipolar.” I hope that this image won’t be considered insensitive. I’ve done some reading about bipolar disorder in relation to artists, since many famous artists and writers have had this disorder. Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry who is also bipolar wrote Touched By Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament and An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (bipolar disorder used to be known as manic depressive illness).

I was inspired to do Illustration Friday today because I received an email this morning from the editor of an-inflight magazine for a middle-eastern airline asking for permission to use my previous illustration for phobia in an article they’re publishing on phobias. The internet is sure amazing the way it connects people all over the world!

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Animals Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Invention

Invention

Drawn and painted using Painter digital tools.
To enlarge, click image, select “All Sizes”
This week’s Illustration Friday cue is “Invention.”

I visited the nearby Point Isabelle dog park to sketch today and noticed that everybody had these ball-flinging and picking-up devices. This wonderful invention allows people to exercise their dogs without having to get any exercise themselves. They don’t have to run or walk with their dogs, bend down to pick up the ball, or use any energy throwing it. All they have to do is drive to the dog park, get out and fling the ball while the dog runs around.

Aside from not getting exercise, it’s actually a pretty cool invention, especially for people whose dogs slobber all over the ball, or for people like me who throw the ball so that it hits the ground a few feet away.

I’ll post my ink and watercolor paintings from the park tomorrow.

Categories
Cartoon art Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Clear

Clear
Drawn in pencil, scanned, inked & colored in Painter digitally
(To enlarge, click image, select “All Sizes”)

After a few weeks of being too busy to participate in Illustration Friday, I’m excited that I was able to play again. The topic is “Clear” and I had several ideas: the plastic replicas of a man and woman whose internal organs are visible through their clear plastic “skin” that I had as a kid, a clearcut forest, a bottle of liquid with sediment that is settling until the liquid is clear, a woman with a clear mind and a not-clear mind, but I when I started doodling around with this one, clear (the table) it was the most fun to draw so that’s the one I picked.

Half way through, Painter did another one of its bloop–magic–everything is now gray, too bad–tricks. One minute everything was fine, everything but the line drawing was completely gray and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Finally I tried opening a new file and copying and pasting the two layers I needed into it and it worked. Painter is the most unstable program I’ve used in many years. At least I’ve learned to save every couple minutes. If it wasn’t so late I’d go in and clean up some fuzzy edges but it’s good enough and I’m off to bed.

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Drawing Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: GHOST (True story)

ghost_001

Drawn and painted digitally in Painter. To enlarge, click on image and open “Ghost (Large version)” on Flickr.

When I was a kid my mom made a ghost costume for me out of an old sheet, cutting holes for eyes and arms. Unfortunately it kept slipping around and I couldn’t see where I was going. It was also too long so I kept tripping on it. After about one block of trick-or-treating I stepped on the hem, tripped and fell, getting a nasty bloody nose. Then I had a really cool and scary Halloween costume!

This is a re-do of the drawing I wrote about yesterday that disappeared after working on it for two hours when Painter crashed and I discovered I hadn’t saved the file ever. Painter tends to be very glitchy that way, and I should have known better. I tried to recreate it today and it’s a little different, but better in some ways, and so am I, having learned a few good lessons!

I had a hard time getting the text to look right on screen when I shrunk thefile to fit on the screen. I finally had to reduce the “canvas” size to 450 px wide and then put the type in. Now I see why people use Illustrator. Pixel-based type is terrible if the image isn’t created at the final type size and you have to reduce the image size but Illustrator doesn’t have that problem.

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Every Day Matters Life in general People Sketchbook Pages

Bubbie Hanging Laundry (EDM #88: Breezy)

Breezy - Bubby hanging laundry

Drawn in sketchbook with pencil, scanned into Painter, and digitally inked and painted.

I was very close to my grandmother and was born on her 50th birthday. She was very short and round and so soft…her skin was like velvet…well, very wrinkled velvet, and she always smelled like the sweet dusting powder she used. She had no clothes dryer–didn’t believe in them. She hung everything up to dry in the backyard, though she could barely reach the clothes line. Then EVERYTHING was ironed…even underwear, towels, and sheets. She had a special canvas laundry cart that she dragged the laundry around in that had a pocket stuffed with wooden close pins that I liked to play with. As she ironed she sprinkled the clothes first to dampen them (before steam irons) using a glass milk bottle (from when milk men delivered your milk each morning) with a special top that had holes in it and was designed for that purpose.

I was so happy a few minutes ago…I’d finished this memory drawing of my grandmother (Bubbie) that I’d been working on this week (which was actually for last week’s Everyday Matters challenge) and I’d finished this week’s Illustration Friday challenge and I really liked that drawing too–it WAS so cute and funny. And then Painter crashed just as I added the final, finishing touch. And then I realized I’d been working for two hours and NEVER SAVED that file!!!!! I can’t believe I did that! I was going to post this picture tomorrow and post the Illustration Friday picture tonight, but I can’t. It’s gone. And it’s midnight. I can’t do it over now.

Maybe losing my file was an omen–I’ve been trying to decide whether I wanted to continue pursuing/exploring digital art or stick with watercolors. If I’d done the drawing by hand, I would at least have something to show for the time, something to work with as a reference if I had to do it over. But I have NOTHING. Maybe this was the message I needed to tell me to forget about digital art and stick with paint and paper?

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Animals Drawing Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Illustration Friday: Smitten

Watercolor version

Ink and watercolor in Raffine sketchbook
(Click image, select “All Sizes” to enlarge)

This week’s Illustration Friday word is “Smitten.” My original idea was to draw my Los Angeles sister’s rescued dove and parakeet that have formed a loving pair and live in a big cage in her little living room. I was going to ask her to try to send me a picture of them but remembered she doesn’t have a digital camera and I couldn’t really remember what they looked like. I guess it wouldn’t have really mattered since I just made this bird up anyway, without looking at any photos.

I started by drawing the idea this morning on a piece of scratch paper that had all sorts of other stuff on it so I couldn’t use it directly. I put the sketch on my Wacom tablet and drew over it, getting the drawing into Painter. Then I redrew it and experimented with trying to get the lines cleaner, but realized there were too many things I didn’t know about using the bezier curve tool and I was too tired to learn them today. I messed around with it in Painter way too long, trying out different backgrounds, trying to draw a cage, etc. I wasn’t happy with the way it looked painted in Painter (see below) so I printed out the line drawing layer on a piece of paper ripped out of my Raffine sketchbook. I painted that in watercolor (above) and stuck it back into the binding. I’m feeling less “smitten” by digital painting today and much more in love with watercolor.

Smitten-Digital version

Digital version done completely in Painter (blah)

Categories
Animals Illustration Friday Sketchbook Pages

Illustration Friday: Trouble

Trouble

Digital art done in Painter
Click image to enlarge and select “All Sizes”

I immediately thought of my cat Fiona when I saw this week’s Illustration Friday cue: “Trouble.” She’s always getting into trouble: chewing on electric cords, wrestling with my socks until they’re in shreds, jumping on my head when I’m sleeping in the middle of the night, or walking across a painting and tracking wet paint everywhere…I could go on and on. So I decided to get even and give her a little trouble, even if it’s just in a picture. (But don’t worry, I have no cat door, no raccoons, and love little Fiona dearly, even though she is a naughty girl.)

I also thought of raccoons because I know how much trouble they can cause. My friend Susie had a family of them living in her attic, which was a terrible nightmare since they were were not at all house-trained and had no manners when it came to eating walls and other important stuff. If you’ve seen the cult documentary, Grey Gardens you know what raccoons can do to a house. I knew someone who had a pet raccoon when I was in college. It was really sweet, with the softest little leathery hands, but frequently tore the place apart, opening all the kitchen cabinets and feasting on their contents.

A technical note: Yippee! I’ve solved the Painter conversion problem. I bought a new monitor to hook up to my laptop and ran it through it’s color calibration program before painting. When I transferred the file to my desktop PC with Photoshop, the colors transferred correctly. I could see that the laptop monitor’s colors were lighter and duller, thus requiring me to use stronger brighter colors that, when transferred, were way too strong. The new LCD monitor can also be flipped to vertical (portrait) mode which is too cool! What a difference having a 20″ monitor instead of a tiny laptop monitor to draw with.

Categories
Drawing Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Quiet

Quiet
Drawn and painted using Painter & Wacom tablet (click image and select “all sizes” to enlarge)

I had a few ideas for this week’s Illustration Friday challenge and this one seemed the more upbeat–the other two involved coffins and dead people (they are very quiet, though maybe not too attractive).

I love libraries and anything having to do with books. My “day job” is for a literacy organization and all of my co-workers are also book lovers. I have fond memories of family trips to the library when I was a kid, and also with my sons when I became a parent (and now with my little next-door-neighbor kids).

I really like drawing with the Wacom tablet and Painter when I’m trying to make a picture up from my imagination rather than drawing from life or a reference photo. I can keep sketching and just let images appear–not being exactly sure where I’m going. It’s fun to see who and what appears on the screen. Because I can keep erasing and trying new things on new layers and move things around, I can keep sketching a scene without throwing away tons of paper or sitting in a pile of eraser stubble. It seems a little like sculpting–carving an image out of a bunch of scribbles.

Technical stuff that probably nobody is interested in:
I’m still having trouble with converting Painter files to Photoshop — even if I convert to TIFF as the Painter tech support guy told me to do (because Painter converts it’s files to CMYK instead of RGB when it creates a Photoshop-compatible file), golden yellows look lemon colored. But I have determined that it’s not a problem between to my two computer screens. I opened the Painter file side by side with the Photoshop file on my desktop PC and could see that it was Painter/Photoshop problem not Desktop monitor/Laptop screen. The good news is I’ve learned how to use yet another function in Photoshop: Using Image/Adjustments/Hue-Saturation and tweaking the hue of the yellow channel solves the problem, without having to buy a new screen or anything else. This is also helpful when correcting scan color problems.

Categories
Drawing Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Sketchy day

buddha2_001
Sketched with Wacom table in Painter (digitally)

Tonight I practiced digitally sketching using Painter. I was so tired this afternoon, I didn’t think I’d be able to muster up anything to post, but my little Buddha statue inspired me. Before dinner I tried experimenting with my new Kremer Pigments watercolor set, but after not enough sleep last night I was too tired to try anything requiring brains. So I just messed around with sunsets over the bay, doing about 5 of them in my Raffine sketchbook (which I still don’t like, so didn’t mind “wasting” pages). The Kremer pigments are definitely more opaque than I’m used to, and in this set there’s nothing I could use to make a nice pinky purple. Instead of using my regular palette too, I just goofed around with the Kremers. They’re such gorgeous paints, but I can see how they need to be selected judiciously, depending on what I’m painting. I think they’d be great for landscape painting.

I’m posting this since it’s what’s in the sketchbook for today, but I think it’s icky. Both images can be clicked for larger versions.
Icky-sunset

Watercolor in Raffine 5.5×8.5 sketchbook

I worked from home this morning but my internet connection had slowed way down, requiring much crawling around under my desk connecting and disconnecting things to test it. Comcast is going to send someone out on Friday, though now it seems back to normal. When my day job work was done, it was so sunny and warm outside I couldn’t resist the call of the backyard chaise lounge. I took a lovely nap out there, dreaming I was painting somewhere really warm (previews of my February painting trip to Puerto Vallarta, perhaps?).

Then my son drove up and woke me so I got him to help me earthquake strap my new 6′ high white bookshelf to the wall. It’s a great bookcase that someone had put out on the street with a “free” sign on it. I loaded it into my trusty Toyota RAV-4, cleaned it up a bit and now it’s all ready to be filled with all the journals, sketchbooks and artbooks that don’t fit in the studio bookshelf.

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Animals Illustration Friday

Illustration Friday: Phobia (Acrophobia)

Phobia (Acrophobia)

UPDATE: This illustration was sold to and published in Cedar Wings, the inflight magazine of Middle East Airlines, AirLiban, Issue #99.

This week’s prompt for Illustration Friday is the word “Phobia.” I have a pretty bad fear of heights, though I wouldn’t call it a phobia since it doesn’t prevent me from being in high places. It just makes me feel a little sick. Standing on the edge of cliffs always makes me feel like there is a powerful gravitational force pulling me off the edge (my stomach starts churning just thinking about it). Driving up steep hills I feel afraid the car is going to fall off backwards–I have nightmares about this occasionally–and it too makes my stomach churn. Maybe it has to do with my being tall–which always makes the ground seem far away?

I did this entirely in Painter, first sketching on the Wacom tablet using a digital pencil and then drawing with digital ink on another layer, then painting with the the digital airbrush because I haven’t learned how to use the other brushes yet. When I saved the file as a Photoshop file and looked at it on my other computer that is color callibrated, the colors were way off again. So I resaved the file in Painter as a jpg and the colors saved OK (not perfect though–the white clouds are pink and I had to adjust the color of the green land because it was too lime green). But little by little I’m learning how to work with this fun new art tool.

Tomorrow, Saturday, September 22 is the 10th International Sketchcrawl. I’m planning to go to the SF crawl and should have some sketches from SF and Sausalito to post tomorrow (if I’m not too tired tomorrow night!)