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.