Liveinabin's scribbles - Happy Accidents

RSS Bot · March 27, 2008

The process of painting seems to me to be one string of happy (usually) accidents. You start out with a pretty solid idea of what you want, but that's always a poor relation to what you get in the end. This holds true for traditional media, but increasingly for digital. Indeed, the whole element of chaos (or lack thereof) is what kept me from digital art for so long. I remember stating at college (long ago) that I'd NEVER paint with a computer.

Photoshop was the first step away from paint for me, though still a very tight set of tools, but Corel Painter really tipped the balance.

Now I've got a processor fast enough to really let it rip, the possibilities open to me now are, frankly, terrifying. It's like the cereal isle of a well stocked supermarket. The bewildering variety is just too much. I've been reading various paint tutorials about toolsets that I've yet to use, textures and effects and the pandora's box of the brush creator - which offers near infinite variation in tool creation. It's scaring the crap out of me!

So, blinkers back on for the moment. Maybe try a new gizmo every week and try to stay focused.

This weeks beauty was 'Square Conté 22', a slightly customized soft pastel. Brilliant for getting colour down, but surprisingly adept at more subtle blending. In fact, all of the picture so far has been painted with just three brushes, Square Conté 22, Grainy water blender and my old faithful, Blender brush - the smeary great blob of colour from which happy accidents spring!

So, progress. After slinging all that colour at the canvas, now I'm reigning in the detail on the background. Partly reinforcing original detail features, mostly bringing forward and refining those little 'happy accidents'. The task at the moment is figuring out where the light sources are, and what colour they are. I've definitely got a man off-camera right with a diffused blue spotlight but the red ambient light and the hole punched in the ceiling (lighting the foreground sand) were just the result of scribbling with Mr Square Conté 22. Bless him.

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