Experimenting with Digital Art

[bunn]

I whipped up a quick landscape - entirely, shock horror, in pixels!



 I could have painted it faster on canvas, and the interface (virtual palette, mouse or pen tablet) just feels kind of clunky and fiddly.   I feel like I have far less fine control using the mouse and I still can't quite get my head around the idea that I use the pen in one place and colour appears somewhere else.   I feel a bit RSI-ish after painting this very simple land/skyscape, which would not be at all taxing on paper! 

However, I am interested that I can apparently  'paint' in what is recognisably my style, via the laptop.  This could open up some interesting new ideas...   Click for bigger...

Comments

[motetus.livejournal.com]

Ooh, nice! Was this with Painter? I love the effects people can do with it, but all my attempts were disastrous and I'm too lazy to sit down properly and teach myself how to use it.

Control and pen/screen coordination does improve with practice. RSI from painting too many grassy scenes, however, does not.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I used Paint Shop Pro - it has oil brush, palette knife and smear, although I think part of the control issue was that the person whose brush they were emulating doesn't use a brush quite the way I do, and the smear tool has too much randomness built into it so it's like smearing with a very big sponge or something : you get smear effects outside of the area of the 'brush'.

Possibly specialist paint software that isn't also trying to be a photo retouching and vector editing suite would be better.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

That's pretty good. Thanks for making it, and for posting it.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Thank *you* - bows politely.

[chainmailmaiden]

I love the colours and the style, it is definitely recognisable as you. Also like the new journal theme you created with it :-)

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

Who needs Monet now, eh:-)

[sibila-cantus.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that's pretty! Lovely colors. I'm impressed by the brush strokes and palette knife smears you can achieve in that program, it's very realistic. Are there watercolor-like brushes as well?

I have an ancient tablet laptop and you can use a stylus as a brush/pen on the screen. I tried experimenting with some free painting software but didn't like the outcome AT ALL. Obviously with the proper tools (like an actual artist's tablet and painting software) like you have the outcome is much better. :D

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I really liked the smearability - but no, this particular program (Paintshop Pro) can't do watercolour, only oil.

It does have chalk, pastel, crayon, coloured pencil, marker and 'finger smear' but I don't think they are as good as the oil simulator... I suspect that painting software that was just focussed on the painting side of things would have more options.

I don't think I can really justify buying Corel Painter 12 at a hundred quid to experiment further, but I am quite tempted by the cut-down Corel Painter Essentials at £27...

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a surprisingly good result - the digitalness/program I mean, not you: I'm not surprised by the goodness of your artistic ability :-) I wasn't expecting anything so painty-looking. Love the colours you've chosen too.