Tools I Use

When I first began digital painting, I tried the program Painter.  I know there are many digital artists who use and like that program, but I never did get the hang of it, and I thought that, compared to Photoshop, it crashed an awful lot.  So i decided to put my effort into learning how to paint with Photoshop.  This was around the time that Photoshop had upped its game on the painting front, and had come out with the mixer brush.  This brush allows one to mix pixels from an underlying layer in a myriad of ways.  With it you can mix underlying pixels with new paint or with nothing at all in a variety of styles and ways.  The possibilities are endless. 

So I concentrated my efforts on learning to use the mixer brush in Photoshop. By this time, I had acquired a Wacom graphics tablet, and was using a pressure sensitive stylus for my painting.  For those who don't know what this is, it looks like a pen, and when applied to the graphics tablet (while using a brush or other tool in Photoshop), it makes marks on the computer screen.  So it is not quite the same as actually painting on a paper because your hand and stylus are not on the screen, but on the graphics tablet, while your image and paint strokes are showing up on the computer screen.

I used Photoshop and my Wacom tablet to create digital paintings for a number of years, and all my earlier paintings were created that way, but last Christmas I received an IPad Pro and an Apple Pencil.  This enabled me to start using an IPad app called Procreate.  Procreate is a painting and drawing program that lets me paint with the Apple Pencil directly on the screen of my IPad.  It also allows me a lot of freedom in turning and resizing the canvas just by using finger gestures.  Procreate is a very powerful and intuitive app, and I now have switched to using it for all my digital painting.  Now when I try to use Photoshop to paint, it seems very cumbersome and unwieldy.  I still use Photoshop to get images ready to paint, and I often use it on images I have already painted, but I no longer use it for painting.

How I Got To This Point, Part 2

This is the second part of my blog post about how I got to this point in creating my digital art.  In the last post, I recounted how I got into photography and learned Photoshop.  Here I will explain how those interests escalated into digital painting. 

When I was first learning Photoshop i learned a lot from Scott Kelby's books on both digital photography and Photoshop.  Scott Kelby also offered one day seminars which occasionally came to Seattle.  I took one of these, given by Fay Sirkis, called (I think), "Paint Like a Master".  This course is still available from Kelby Training as an online course.  This was my first introduction to what is called 'Photo Painting'.  This is a method of digital painting whereby a photograph is used as the underlying layer, and the digital brush basically smears around the 'paint' picked up from the pixels in the photograph.  Imagine, if you will, an oil painting in which the canvas is completely wet and the paint on the canvas can be smeared in any way by the brush.  That, in a nutshell is what photo painting is. 

It is important to remember that the smearing of the paint is done by a person (in this case, me) wielding a digital brush.  That smearing is not done by a filter which is applied to the whole image, as in sometimes the case in so called digital painting.  Rather, in photo painting all the pixels on the finished canvas have been applied by a human using a digital brush, but the paint colors and the forms painted have (generally) been taken from the underlying photograph.  The painter is also free to add additional paint not found in the photograph to add details or otherwise change the photograph as he or she desires.  Indeed, most teachers of photo painting tell their students to basically smear the original photo so much that all detail is wiped out, and only an underpainting remains, and then to add back detail as necessary. 

Since I don't want to bore the readers of this blog with too long an explanation at any one time, I will continue my explanation of this process in the next blog post.

How I Got To This Point In Creating Digital Art, Part 1

     This will, hopefully, be the first of many entries on the subject of my digital art.  In this first entry, I will describe how I go to this point.  I do not have any formal art training, and I have spent the last 30 or so years absorbed in the world of gardening and plants.  I had a well known garden {at least in gardening circles} on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, and many of the images you see on this site came from that garden.  We sold that property a few years ago, and moved to Port Ludlow, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula where I am now making another, much smaller garden.

An Image from my garden on Bainbridge Island.

Naturally, as my garden developed,  I wanted to photograph it myself and not rely on others to do that for me, so I took up photography.  I started out using a film camera, but soon switched to digital, so I never really got invested in film the way some photographers I know were.  And once I made the switch to digital, I began to want to create images like I saw in books and magazines, and I realized that I needed to learn Photoshop. 

I view Photoshop as a tool by which the photographer develops the image.  A digital image is, after all, just a collection of black and white dots or pixels which are then interpreted by a computer to create the image one actually sees.  The difference between a 'straight out of the camera' image and one processed in Photoshop, is that in the former a computer program in the camera interprets those dots, while the photographer gets some say in how the dots are interpreted with Photoshop.  Neither image is exactly how one actually sees the image, so neither image is 'real' in that sense, but I would argue that a good Photoshop job can capture 'reality' better than any straight out of the camera image.

So I undertook the long task of learning Photoshop, which I did eventually, although it took several years for me to get comfortable with the program. I learned it mainly by taking online courses and just by doing it.  I find Photoshop to be a wonderful tool which enables me to achieve the vision that I see when I take a photograph.  I am still learning new techniques in the program, and probably will never know it all.  I will describe in my next blog entry how I came to digital painting.