I Forgot How To Paint

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I counted my Clip Studio Paint brushes today. I have 4,152 of them. I’m awash in digital brushes. I’ve tried so many brushes that I can’t remember which brushes I used to paint my favorite pictures. When I painted this picture, I told myself, “This brush is just right. It suits me. I will learn everything about it and use it for my next book.” Then, fickle me, I immediately started experimenting with Corel Painter…until I got tired of it. Then I switched to Rebelle and found out that I need 32GB of ram to run it. And then I found Krita and really fell in love with it…until I fell out of love with it when it kept crashing. Then I tried Photoshop, but I found out that we weren’t made for each other.

“Woe is me,” I said to myself. “I seem to have forgotten how to paint pictures that I like. Am I having a mid-career artistic crisis?”

So, I went back to my rock, Clip Studio Paint. That’s where I am today and I know I’m on the path to recovery. I had what I needed all along but I didn’t appreciate it. Now that I’m sane again, I have to rebuild my painterly confidence, and most importantly, I have to find that magic brush!

Lesson 7, Part 2 - Recognizing Shapes and Values

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Painted with Corel Painter’s Blocky Background brush found in the Sargent brush set

This is the final painting of the final lesson of Isis Sousa’s Digital Painting course on Youtube. I recommend the course to anyone who wants to learn the basics of digital painting. Sousa sensei starts the course by explaining the restricted set of brushes that will be used for all of the paintings. For each lesson she provides reference photos, and students can follow along as she does a demonstration painting of the assignment.

The course is given using Corel Painter, but the basic principles of digital painting apply to any full-featured painting software.

Lesson 7, Part 1 - Shape Hierarchy

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Today’s lesson has two parts; I completed part one, which was to paint a protrait from a reference photo of a Brazilian indigenous man. For this lesson our task was to focus on, 1) recognizing shapes; 2) identifying the large shapes and painting them first, then painting the smaller shapes within the large shapes; 3) working with the largest brushes possible to avoid the inevitable temptation to dwell on details. We used the unpredictable Sargent brush, which has a high degree of randomness built in to it’s soul.

It was fun going through the ugliness of the initial stages to see the image come to life when I added the highlight to my subject’s upper lip. Pow!

Lesson 6, As Final As I'm Going to Make It

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Temple of Isis at Philae

I’ve completed Lesson 6 of Isis Sousa’s Digital Painting course on Youtube. The hardest part of this assignment was to paint relatively straight lines. There are also many parallel lines in the reference photograph, and those are hard to replicate without resorting to a digital perspective guide. The temple also has many delicate carving on the faces of the pylons. I did not include them in my painting. In the interest of time I decided to let the rear towers remain unfinished. However, I did add a figure to give the image a sense of scale.

Lesson 7 will cover portrait painting. This will be the most challenging lesson.

Lesson 6 -- Painting Architecture Using Corel Painter 2021

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Blocking out the shapes. To be continued…

Today I began with high hopes that Lesson 6 of Isis Sousa’s digital painting course would be easier than painting foliage or flowers. After all, I thought, this temple has straight lines and flat surfaces. Painting straight lines is tough, but, as I discovered, getting the subtle proportions of this temple right is really challenging. I spent most of the evening trying to block in the shapes, painting them in, then painting over them, again and again. This painting will take several days.

The assignment is to use the Corel Painter Grainy Pressure Knife, part of the Sargent brush collection in Corel Painter 2021. The brush has low opacity at the beginning of the stroke and 100% opacity at the end, just the opposite of the brushes I’m used. It takes some getting used to.

Lesson 5 - Landscape with Oil Pastels

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Today I completed lesson 5 of Isis Sousa’s digital painting course. The assignment was to paint a landscape using an oil pastel style brush. The painting proceeds in five layers: sky, mountains,lake, green pastures, wheat field, and foreground flowers. I painted this on one layer with one brush, the Corel Oily Water brush that’s in the Sargent collection.

My painting is an impressionistic rendition of the original photograph (below). The only part of the painting that I would repaint is the cute little mountain at the left of the picture — it’s too smooth and blended. Other than that, I’m happy with the painting.

Lesson 6 reference photo courtesy of Isis Sousa

Lesson 6 reference photo courtesy of Isis Sousa

Chore Day, December 5, 2020: Laundry, Vacuuming, Baking, and Arting

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Bedside lamp and pillow and Monet print, Corel Painter, Sargent brush

Today was a normal chore day. I welcome normal. I love a day when there’s no snow, no wildfires, everyone is healthy. I ask for nothing more than normal.

For the record, I did all of the laundry, vacuumed the entire house, baked some quinoa flat bread for fun, and tested Rebelle 3. Rebelle is known as the best digital watercolor app, but oil painting is coming in version 4. It looks like it will be awesome. I want it!

Even though my day is normal, I have problems: I like Corel Painter, and I like Rebelle, and I like Photoshop, and I like Clip Studio Paint Ex. That’s a lot of likes. Am I spreading myself too thin? Time will tell where I eventually focus my attention.

My other problem is that I have to create a page for this blog that displays my books. That’s a good problem. The next problem is that I have a Tumblr site that gets updated when I publish a post here…but the images are not exported to Tumblr. I have to get into a groove so that I upload every image to Tumblr. The last problem that I’m aware of is that I need to do better with social media, by which I mean post regularly to Instagram. I should be posting there every time I create a post in this blog.

Lesson Three -- Begonias and A Mystery Flower

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Today’s painting lesson, number three from Isis Sousa, was to paint a garden scene while acknowledging the different planes, working from back plane to front plane: the fence, the tree, the red begonias, the foliage, and the mysterious purple and white flowers. I painted the picture on one layer with the Corel Painter Sargent brush. It’s a tricky brush that I have a hard time controlling.

We’re not supposed to use the color picker to select colors. Even without using the picker, I got the colors relatively close.

Chore Day, Nov 28, 2020: Laundry, Yard Work, and Rebelle 3

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The Corel Painter mixer palette

Today’s chores were standard fare: laundry, vacuuming the house, and doing yard work. The yard work was raking up the leaves that the neighbor’s walnut tree drops into our yard every fall.

The rest of the day I spent testing Rebelle 3, a digital painting app that does a great job of mimicking water color paint. I liked it enough to consider buying it, but my computer, going on seven years old, couldn’t hack it — all 8 threads were pegged at 100% CPU usage. To run Rebelle 3 on my system, I would have to do an upgrade of motherboard, CPU, GPU, and ram. Besides, learning another software system is a distraction. At this point, I’m married to Clip Studio Paint, Photoshop, and Corel Painter.

The Final Cover Page and Title Pages for Book 2

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The front matter title page. It now spreads over two pages.

Today I ordered Corel Painter 2021. I want to paint digitally in a traditional manner and Painter does a good job of simulating real paint. This means that I have to study oil painting techniques and apply them to digital painting. I’m not going to do any real life oil painting — it’s way too messy and I don’t have a ventilated studio. My turpentine will be strictly virtual. More about that project in the coming months.

I finalized the title page for my second children’s book. I moved the portraits of the major characters to the back cover and scaled them down a bit. They look comfortable there.

Here’s what the cover page looks like now.

The cover page for The Butterfly who airlifted his friends over the wall.