More Digital Painting

Although my traditional paintings seem to be realistic and tight, my digital paintings are getting looser and more abstract. Here's my latest....

Corel Painter12- watercolors this week

Here are the watercolors I did this week using Corel Painter12. I still can't seem to find all the brushes I need or remember the names of the ones I have! Iguess it is time to start making some!

Impressionistic Tulip Field - Painter 12

Here's my version of an impressionistic painting of a field of Tulips...still experimenting with Painter
I'm finding a crazy amount of bugs in the program, especially in the user interface. I expected it to work more flawlessly.

New Facebook Page...Pattie Foxhoven Watercolors

Hi! I just started a facebook page to post paintings....feel free to go there and "like" it to get updates...

https://www.facebook.com/PattieFoxhovenWatercolors

I am still playing with Painter 12 trying to understand and master brushes, categories, subcategories, and dabs to get the outcome I want. It is not intuitive yet, but I am making progress. Here is the most recent comparison-

Traditional or Digital Watercolor?

I've decided to learn the program Corel Painter to play around with digital watercolor. The interface at first glance looks quite a bit like Photoshop, which makes guessing what things do easier, but the brushes and details take a bit of time to understand and master.  I have not made any of my own brushes yet or loaded any that I downloaded, but I was able to create a painting with the limited knowledge I have obtained from watching videos on Lynda. com and YouTube thus far.

Here is a comparison of a simple painting done in traditional watercolor on paper and one done on the computer. I first made the pen and ink drawing and scanned it for use on the digital painting. Then I completed both paintings separately, including washes and salt.  I have yet to find a good dry brush or determine when to use  "watercolor ", "digital watercolor ", or "real watercolor " brushes and layers since they do not cooperate and play well with each other as mix n match. Here is my first attempt at the digital watercolor. I like the wet sky but really need to find a nice dry brush that lets paper grain show through.

Diptychs

This is Diptych week.This week I did a Documentary Photography Diptych Project. A diptych is any object with two flat plates attached at a hinge. This type of art was quite popular in the ancient world.  The modern day diptych is a set of two images that work together or separately; they are a mini story in two frames. You can read more about the history of diptychs at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diptych 

I took a series of photos in Downtown San Jose, CA. I then combined several of them for each diptych to show parts of the downtown that stood out to me.

Transparent objects in Photoshop

image1

image2

This week's exercise is placing transparent objects from one photo  into a scene of another photo and ensuring that they appear transparent. There are several ways to do this. In image 1, I removed the  background using the blend if option so that the winery showed through the wine glass. The image inside of  wine glass was also rippled and bloated a bit so that it looked distorted through the glass.
 For the second image, I used select color range to select and copy the white part of the light bulb so that the images I placed inside of it would show.

My Dinner With Norman Rockwell

This week I had to choose someone who is not around anymore to have dinner with and blend them into the appropriate surroundings along with supporting pictures and a menu. I thought it would be cool to chat with Norman Rockwell if here were still here, so I took a photo of me with my hubby at Johnny Rockets and blended Norman Rockwell's head/neck and part of his shirt into that of my hubby's body.Since my picture of him is actually a painting, I painted my hair and part of my face so it would match. I modified all the skin tones to match and then added supporting photos and made up a menu.

Painting in PHOTOSHOP

This week was all about painting in Photoshop. I started by using the mixing brush on a tree photo and then applied some filters (see yellow tree painting). Then, I took a photo of a barn that I took and painted that using various brushes with the mixing brush tool (what a fabulous tool!) I also applied some layer modes and filters to that. Then, I did a drawing from scratch by painting some outlines, fills, shadows, etc. That one became the dragonfly.

ILLUSTRATOR: another icon

This one started with a whole sewing machine, and in the process of simplifying, I only kept the minimum needed to indicate sewing and made it into an icon and a Iphone type icon.

ILLUSTRATOR: Google Logo

This week was "make your own GOOGLE logo" week. I like painting so I had to make one that covered that topic. I started with a real Google logo and made it all black with live paint and then I used the "paint inside" feature to draw a radial gradient inside of the letter. I did a little painting over it for fun with the blob brush and made some symbols for paint splatter to add at the end. I created the brushes and made them fit over the letters. Finally I added a drop shadow and called it good. I thought about using a tie die graphic I created and a clipping mask to make it show through the letters, but I settled on the paint idea instead.

another icon

I made one more icon for practice, this time a sewing machine. I made it in a grey gradient and then used recolor artwork to make it blue. It was a cool feature.

ILLUSTRATOR: icon

The intent here was to create an icon for a device such as a phone or Ipad. I chose a cooking pot that might be used for a cooking application. This thing again used many layers to get the reflective qualities of both the pot and the button to show properly.

ILLUSTRATOR: Storybook Illustration

Here I was to create a two page spread for a children's book using Illustrator.
I used so many layers that I nearly go lost in it! I had to go in and rename them all so I knew what they were. I dried many different effects here to learn as much as possible.

ILLUSTRATOR: magazine subscription card

This week I made a card that would be torn out of a magazine if you wanted to subscribe. Shown are both the front and back of the card. This used gradients, patterns, draw inside, lines, effects, and lettering.

ADV ILLUSTRATOR WEEK 2

After learning how to wrap stars around a circle evenly, I drew a zebra using the pen tool in unconventional colors for my animal drawing assignment.

ILLUSTRATOR-self portrait

For my final project for Illustrator, I had to draw a portrait. Here's my version of a self-portrait. I can't even count how many layers and sub-layers this took. It was so fun to make that I couldn't stop once I started. Finally at 6am I had to go to bed and tidy up some layers in the morning.

ILLUSTRATOR- Iphone style Icon

The assignment here was to make an icon like the ones you see on an IPhone or IPad. Rather than copy the pencil in the tutorial, I decided to make my own crayon in one of my favorite bright colors and see how it went. Here it is in 4 different resolutions. The big one was done in 512x512 pixels.

PHOTOSHOP MIDTERM PROJECT

This project is in memory of my Grandmother, Ada, who was so excited that I was a computer science major since we were related to Ada Lovelace, who is credited with being the first computer programmer. The large image on the right is the difference machine. She also worked on the analytical engine. Some schematics of that are in the background along with her mathematical equations. I took so many images here and overlapped and blended them that I almost lost track. There were formulas, schematics, photos, drawings, and text. Desaturating and colorizing was fun. Trying to make the text flow and space properly was a bit of a challenge.

It took a while to find the "just right" old fashioned typewriter font.