Category: Digital Painting

WIP – “What’s Missing?” by Helen E. H. Madden, 9 March 2011

Slowly but surely, inch by inch, I’m getting more work done on this. I’ve switched to painting this on my desktop since, as expected, the iPad simply isn’t big enough to handle a detailed oil painting in ArtRage. The actually painting is now around 3500×4000 pixels, extremely large, but it makes it much easier to handle the brush strokes of the oil brush. I’m also trying to use the metallic paint setting on the robots, which presents unique challenges all its own. Metallic paint comes out much darker than the color actually picked. And I continue to experiment with the oil brush settings in general, switching back and forth between insta-dry, square and round tip, thinners and no thinners. I’m slooooooooooowly getting the hang of it.

I’ll continue working on this throughout the week. I think the one thing I’ve learned so far is to let go of expectations and just keep putting down the digital paint. I can’t really control what each brush stroke is going to look like, so I just have to trust the process and continue to work from there. We’ll have to see if I get much farther next week, since I’m going out of town tomorrow for a few days, but hopefully, there’ll be some progress.

WIP – “What’s Missing?” by Helen E. H. Madden, 2 March 2011

Well, I got the sketch as finalized as I was going to get it, so I finally switched to the underpainting stage. Again, I’m still following the tutorial in Digital Artist Magazine (this was last month’s issue, with the article on using metallic paint in ArtRage). I’ve got all the basic colors laid down and some ideas for the lighting. Next I want to import some photos for texture and then get to the nitty gritty of the painting stage.

So far, I like it. But I have a feeling before too much longer I’m going to have to move this piece to the PD and blow up the size to really get the detail in the painting that I want. We’ll see. I’ll post the results next week.

What’s Missing, WIP by Helen E. H. Madden, 15 Feb 2011

I haven’t gotten too much farther on this one. The whole Girl Scout Cookie Mom thing has pretty much eaten what little spare time I had. Hell, it’s eaten my entire life at this point.

Anyway, I finished up the sketch, combined all layers of the pencil drawings, and then started adding in loose shadows using the oil paint brush in ArtRage. I’ve got the thinners set between 80-90% and the loading up around 100%. I laid the oil paint down in a separate layer over the pencil sketch. I may put a copy of the sketch on top so I can continue to see it as I work. Don’t know yet though. I do know the next step will be to lay down the basic colors.

I’m going to be at Farpoint this coming weekend and plan to take my iPad with me. Hopefully I’ll get some more work on this done while I’m there.

What’s Missing, WIP by Helen E. H. Madden, 6 Feb 2011

The latest issue of Digital Artist magazine had a lovely article on using the metallic paint settings in ArtRage. I’ve been reading everything I can find on ArtRage lately, since I’ve been enjoying using the program on my iPad, and I decided to see if I could replicate the results of the Digital Artist article in some of my own artwork.

I decided to follow the same process outlined in the article, starting with a detailed sketch of what I wanted to paint. This is a big departure from my previous ArtRage drawings, which have pretty much been created on the fly rather than planned out. Thus this image is going to be here on WIP Wednesday rather than showing up on Freaky Friday, because it’s going to take longer to produce.

The sketch is heavily influenced by the artwork in the DA article, which was also of a robot. I like robots, so I’m more than happy to try and paint a few. I’m still working out the details of the sketch, especially the background. I have a hard time creating environments for my artwork, thus my preference for doing portraits. But I think it’s time I stretched my wings a bit, so I’m going to create as detailed a background as I can here. I’ve borrowed other elements from the DA painting as well, including the windows with a strong light source and the idea of a robot painting something. However, the theme is a bit different, as you’ll see if you check out this month’s issue of DA.

Next week I hope to have the sketch finalized. Then I can start the underpainting stage, something else I don’t normally do with my ArtRage doodles. We’ll see how this works!

“The Cookie Thief” by Helen E. H. Madden

Well, here it is, the final version of “The Cookie Thief.” It’s not really finished, but I’ve done as much as I want with this image for now. So I’m letting it rest and moving onto another WIP next week.

What I learned from this WIP. I like the Brushes app for the iPad a LOT. It’s very easy to use and responds very well. I still love ArtRage, but Brushes is far less buggy and hasn’t yet crashed on me like ArtRage has on a few occasions. I think Brushes is great for anything painterly style, including certain cartoons, but I’d still go with ArtRage for ink style line art for now.

I also learned the importance of keeping stuff on separate layers. I screwed myself by painting the thief and the cookie jar on the same layer initially and I had to go back and fix that to make it easier to shade. I also think I would have been better off working back to front, getting that second jar done first before working on the cookie jar and then the thief. Of course, this would have implied I’d had a plan when I started this piece…

So this is it for this piece for now. I may try to set things up so that I can export the Brushes actions for this painting to my desktop and create an AVI of that so you can see the work in progress. That might be a bit long to watch though. I spent forever on this dang thing. We’ll see if I do that or not.

WIP – “The Cookie Thief” by Helen E. H. Madden

I keep working on this a little bit at a time and I think it’s coming along well. It’s certainly not bad for my first real digital painting. By ‘digital painting’ I mean a work of digital art that I draw and paint in the computer using tools and brush strokes that mimic traditional painting like oils or acrylics. Yes, the stuff that’s been showing up on my Freaky Friday posts is also digital painting, but I consider that more cartooning, which is it’s own weird beast in the realm of digital art. At least it is to me anyway.

I decided to add another jar to the background. I have no idea what should go in it yet. Nor do I think I’m quite finished with the background, though I don’t know what else to add. I may just concentrate on finishing up the two jars and then leave it at that. I can always work on more complicated paintings later on.

Working in Brushes on the iPad has been great, but I’ve discovered that I can only seem to focus on painting digitally for a few minutes at a time. Unless it’s cartoons, and that’s because with the cartoons, I know what I’m doing. With the digital painting, I’m really just feeling my way around in the dark, and I think I keep losing focus after a short time because I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Or rather, I don’t have much confidence in what I’m doing. I’ll keep at it though. I think this particular image looks promising so far.