Lesson 6, Day 2 -- Painting the Temple of Isis with Corel Paint

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Painted with Corel Painter and the Grainy Pressure Knife.

Today I continued to work on my painting of the Temple of Isis at Philae. It’s slow going, but I’m enjoying the challenge.

When I first started painting and drawing 5 years ago, I thought, “Why bother blocking out shadows and highlights? Why worry about color relationships? I’ll just paint what I see and be done with it.” It turns out that I simply can’t paint what I see because my brain is very lazy and thinks that people look like stick figures and all buildings are square. My brain also tells me that there are only three colors, bright red, bright blue, and bright yellow. My brain is really just a 5-year old and has a lot of dumb ideas about how to paint.

Check out Isis Sousa’s Digital Painting courses on Youtube.

Lesson 6 -- Painting Architecture Using Corel Painter 2021

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Blocking out the shapes. To be continued…

Today I began with high hopes that Lesson 6 of Isis Sousa’s digital painting course would be easier than painting foliage or flowers. After all, I thought, this temple has straight lines and flat surfaces. Painting straight lines is tough, but, as I discovered, getting the subtle proportions of this temple right is really challenging. I spent most of the evening trying to block in the shapes, painting them in, then painting over them, again and again. This painting will take several days.

The assignment is to use the Corel Painter Grainy Pressure Knife, part of the Sargent brush collection in Corel Painter 2021. The brush has low opacity at the beginning of the stroke and 100% opacity at the end, just the opposite of the brushes I’m used. It takes some getting used to.

Lesson 5 - Landscape with Oil Pastels

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Today I completed lesson 5 of Isis Sousa’s digital painting course. The assignment was to paint a landscape using an oil pastel style brush. The painting proceeds in five layers: sky, mountains,lake, green pastures, wheat field, and foreground flowers. I painted this on one layer with one brush, the Corel Oily Water brush that’s in the Sargent collection.

My painting is an impressionistic rendition of the original photograph (below). The only part of the painting that I would repaint is the cute little mountain at the left of the picture — it’s too smooth and blended. Other than that, I’m happy with the painting.

Lesson 6 reference photo courtesy of Isis Sousa

Lesson 6 reference photo courtesy of Isis Sousa

Lesson Four -- Decaying Leaves

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Painted on one layer using a modified Speckle Grainy Hard Dip brush in the Corel Painter Sargent collection.

Today’s I completed lesson 4 of Isis Sousa’s helpful Corel Painter course. This lesson emphasized simplifying a complex scene (rotting leaves on a gravel background), analyzing value, determining colors correctly, and working on edges. My painting vaguely resembles the reference photo, and my colors are unique to my brain, but the painting is a success. I immensely enjoy painting on one layer.

I had trouble modifying the brush for this assignment. The goal was to change the Speckle Grainy Hard Dip brush so that it would behave like the Sargent brush, with low opacity at the beginning of the stroke and high opacity at the end. My brush turned out just the opposite; it laid on the paint thick at the beginning and faded away at the end. It worked out okay because of a happy accident — when the brush stopped painting, it started smudging and pulling paint around like a champion. Corel Painter brush setting are crazy complex.

Lesson Three -- Begonias and A Mystery Flower

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Today’s painting lesson, number three from Isis Sousa, was to paint a garden scene while acknowledging the different planes, working from back plane to front plane: the fence, the tree, the red begonias, the foliage, and the mysterious purple and white flowers. I painted the picture on one layer with the Corel Painter Sargent brush. It’s a tricky brush that I have a hard time controlling.

We’re not supposed to use the color picker to select colors. Even without using the picker, I got the colors relatively close.

The Three Apples Lesson

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Corel Painter Sargent brush following Isis Sousa’s tutorial.

Now that I’ve published my second book, I’m taking some time off before I start working on book 3 — I want to learn more about painting, digital painting, that is.

I’m fortunate to have found Isis Sousa’s Corel Painter tutorial on Youtube. She mercifully restricts the brushes to the Sargent brush set, and she provides color-corrected reference photos so that we students can practice. I especially appreciate her course because she’s actually teaching how to paint digitally rather than merely focusing on showing how to use Painter’s many features.