Atrus and Anna

Cheetah

There is never an end to learning ...

Zebra

The stripes and colors got away from me a bit, so now it looks like a tiger! It's supposed to be a Grevy's zebra.

Kitty

Midsummer Twilight

Painting practice done at the National Gallery of Art. Done in Painter. approx. 2 hours.

More Painting Practice

Painting practice using National Geographic issues as inspiration. Isn't Nat Geo awesome?

Blue-Footed Booby

Quick paint to test out Painter 11 on my new Macbook pro (!).

Little Glass Bottle

Wow, it's been a long time since I've had a chance to sit down and paint something. Ahhh.

I did this last night. It's based on a picture I took at the Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris.

-Painter 9
-1.5 hours

Animation Background Painting – Tree trunk

I painted this yesterday with the intention of making a short animation on top of it. The drawing was based on one of my photos from Panama. The process of painting is similar to the one I discuss here.

I scanned in the approx. 8.5 x 12 inch drawing (based on the 720x480 pixel ratio) at 300 dpi. In Painter, I made the drawing a "gel" layer and painted a base color layer beneath it. To emphasize the tree trunk being in the foreground, I painted another layer above the drawing, smudging the pencil lines. All the painting was done with the wonderful chunky SOFT oil pastel.

Digital Painting with a Nintendo DS

My boyfriend bought me a Nintendo DS for my birthday along with the tools necessary to run "Colors," a painting program. It was a little awkward at first, but I'm warming up to it a lot. My goal is to be able to use it to paint from life, which I never do.

Here's what I've done so far:

Painting Backgrounds – Rainforests

Teapot

Source:

A teapot on my desk at school.

Stone Patio

Source:
Photo from Loisaba, a reserve in Kenya.

Lessons Learned:
This is a work in progress ...

Sundowners

Source:
I don't know about other places, but in Sweetwaters, a conservancy in Kenya, there is a thing called "sundowners." Where you get some alcohol and friends and drive out to some lookout point to watch the sunset and drink. On once such excursion, I took this picture.

Lessons Learned:
This was a nice lesson: When you have a picture with both an evening sky and the earth, the earth will look dark, but rich. And the sky will still look bright. In fact, if I replaced the grass with a more lighter, faded color, you would think it was a totally different time of day.

Also, I learned something about painting trees. Usually, to make trees, I paint blobs of green overlapping in a circle shape. Those blobs represent the sides of the canopy where, from a side view, perspective forces leaves to overlap and making solid shapes. In the middle of those blobs would be lines of varying thickness representing the trunk and branches. After that it was sort of fuzzy. But then I realized that there would be some blobs in the middle too, from thick branches, on either side of the tree. But most important, there should be some area where you can see the other side.

Plant from Panama

Source:
A picture of a plant I took while in hiking in Panama.

Lessons Learned:
I really liked the way the leaves came out. Once again, it was all in the highlight. I also added very faint, thin white lines along the leaves. In the smallest, topmost leaf, I added tiny white lines in the highlight to imply a bit of texture. I think that worked well.

The flower, which of course commands the most attention, was turning out to be a disaster. I was following the photo quite religiously and it just wasn't showing any shape. So, on a whim I added some strong highlights to the tips of the petals and Voila! it looked much better. It seems as if I may have learned and then applied something! Yay!

Girl with Bonnet

Source:
Photo of a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (American Paintings).

Lessons Learned:
I really wish I had taken more time with this one. Once again, delicate white highlights, strategically placed, give the painting it's dimension. Also, look at the bump just to the right of her nose. A dark area separates the lip area from the cheek area. What really kicked it up a notch was adding bit of highlight to the area underneath the shadow to imply the area slopes downward before entering that shadow. And also to the left of the nose I added highlights to imply a slope. It was a very exciting discovery.

I also finally saw for myself something I had read many times: adding red around the eyes, nose (especially nostrils), and ears really gives the face a warm feeling.

Ecocamp

Source:
An all wooden facility in the mountains above David, Panama. I can't really say much about it. But when we were there as part of a field course in college studying biology. It had such a campy feel we decided to dub the place, "ecocamp."

Lessons Learned:
Disaster. Unlike the Kurita Museum Hallway, this was intended to be a quicky, and it looks that way. There's nothing wrong with quickies I think, but I really didn't pay attention to the lines or the perspective the way I should have. That is soooo important. If the perspective doesn't work, the whole thing falls apart.

Also, that's not snow in the background. I don't know what I was thinking, but I had decided to just copy the over-exposed background of the photo exactly as shown.

Horse in Front of Gunma Museum of History

Source:
A giant horse statue standing in front of the Gunma Museum of History (Japan).

Lessons Learned:
I have a tendency to just go in and throw dark and light shadows all over the place creating paintings with indistinguishable light sources (aka they look bad). So, with this one, I tried to block in the obvious blocks of shadow and light, not worrying about the bits of highlight within each value block. This was fun to do that with because it was all one color. Once those blocks are set up, you can add dark and light values relative to the block value. One light, medium and dark hue are not going to cut it for the whole thing.

Bone from Gunma Museum of History

Source:
A bone from the primitive people's section of the Gunma Museum of History.

Lessons Learned:
I thought doing something small would be fun and simple, but it turned out very difficult! I don't know what went wrong. It looks a bit overly smooth. Some subtle texture might help. And the edges don't make it stand out from the background enough.