More Digitals

Here at our beloved Painted Views Ranch I've been spending so much time getting ready for our upcoming art classes that it's left precious little time for making art, but my iPad is proving to be a great help with that. When I have a few minutes I can work on images and not need a large enough block of time to make it worthwhile dragging out the paints and then cleaning the brushes.

One thing I've learned is that what this digital media really excels at is enhancing photos that I've taken. I've had this photo I took here at the ranch that I've been wanting to recreate as a painting (mainly because I was so pleased with its composition) but just haven't found the time. Because Texas summer afternoons can be brutal, I did take some time to work indoors with the iPad and Apple pencil to make this somewhat boring photo taken at midday ...

... look more like an early morning "Golden Hour" scene.
After "painting" over the electrical wires and other unwanted distracting objects I set up a palette of colors (borrowed from my artistic hero, Maxfield Parrish) and set about doing some enhancements. The variety of digital brushes make it possible to drag colors onto the image in much the same way that a painter would use a flat brush to add highlights on a canvas. But the sky was still lifeless, so I looked through other photos I'd taken in early morning and set up another palette from which to grab colors as I painted a new sky.

I think the end result is a much more interesting image than the original. What are your thoughts?

And I've also been scribbling away using the black and white palette I mentioned in the previous post to create this drawing of a bowline knot.

Unlike the previous knot drawing done from a photo, this was done from out of my head, and the hard part was laying it out so that it actually looked like a bowline should. But from there, the palette made it easy to select colors (OOOPS!) not colors, but the grey tones that would make the lighting believable.

Digital Doodling

I've been enjoying my first forays into the world of digital art with an Apple Ipad Pro, an Apple Pencil and Procreate, an image editor designed specifically for those tools. It's been an interesting journey and seems to have almost endless possibilities for creating art. So far the most significant limitation looks like it will be my imagination. We'll see how it plays out from here. This first one, which I'd call "Space Freighter" made great use of the concept of layers. With different elements of the image being created on different layers which allowed each of them to be created and then manipulated independently from each other, before saving them all together as one image.

One of the many things that Procreate will let you do is create your own palette of colors so that you can conveniently return to them and select specific colors when you need them. For this next one I choose no colors at all, but instead created a palette of 16 shades of gray, evenly spaced along the spectrum from black to white.

So the whole work was done with only tones of gray and no color at all. That made it easy to locate values that had the best relationship to each other.

I'm really excited about having found this new (to me) media. It will be an interesting journey to watch progress. Wish me luck!