Al Fresco Art Club Challenge, Nov 22, 2020 -- Paint A Portrait

Today’s Al Fresco Art Club challenge was to paint in a traditional style. We could use traditional media or digital, which I chose. After all, my aim is to learn how to paint digitally so that’s what I want to practice. My reference photo was one that I downloaded from New Masters Academy several years ago. The model in this picture is Rajiv. I used a simple round opacity brush in Procreate.

I’m pleased that my painting actually resembles Rajiv. It feels good to see some improvement from week to week.

Buddy Wants to be "family"

I created a new version of the “buddy asks to become part of the Jay family” picture. I’m dropping the original version of the picture completely. I couldn’t make the picture fit the landscape orientation without doing way too much work. It was faster to create and new picture.

Here’s the version I won’t be using.

And here’s the new version. Momma Jay needs some attention. It’s a Work In Progress

It's too late to save Buddy Butterfly

In are burst of activity I edited two images and reformatted them in inDesign. The pictures are okay, but I noticed some new problems. In one picture I drew the clouds by hand; in the other I used a digital cloud brush. When I saw this inconsistency I started to think about how the reader might be distracted by the change in styles — I am and I’m the artist! I then considered going through all of the pictures and standardizing the way the clouds are painted. That’s a scary thought because there are lots of clouds. Then I began to think, if I try to make this book perfect, I’ll never finish it. I’ve been working for 8 months for a 3-month project. Every revision sets me back, and the publish date is being pushed further into the future.

I’m going to have to let the cloud problem fade into the background. In the next book all of the clouds will be drawn in the same style.

Clouds painted with a digital brush.

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Clouds drawn by hand.

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Weekly Al Fresco Art Club Artrage Challenge

This week the Al Fresco Art Club did not paint in the great outdoors — we stayed in the studio. We decided, the two of us, that we would try out hand at doing a still life of things lying around the house, such as a bottle of wine we use as a door stop, a bottle of olive oil, and a small tomato. The real challenge was to use Artrage to make the painting. To keep it interesting, we had several restrictions: 1) Use only one layer; 2) No using Undo; 3) No using erasers. In other words, we were challenged to adhere to the same restrictions we would face if we were using real paint and a canvas.

Here’s my effort.

Picture #9, The Tree House painted

A quick post today. I colored picture #9, the tree house, today. I used Procreate. The tree house looked a little empty so I added a lamp, a sofa, and a “Home Sweet Home” poster. There a lots of colors in this picture. Maybe too many.

Painting the Magic Moustache Bus

Today I completed the re-inking of the Magic Moustache Bus, also known as picture #3, and started painting it. But, the more I looked at the line work, I realized that I wanted to touch it up here and there. I ended up spending another hour going over work I did yesterday, and probably removed some of the charm by straightening some endearing wobbly lines. I’d better get this picture finished before it becomes a mental roadblock.

I finally have the color palette memorized for all of the major characters: the Jay family, Buddy Butterfly, and the two mouse stowaways. It’s taken 5 months. I wonder if other artists have a problem sticking to their color palettes?

This is a preview of picture #3 in Kindle Create. Of course, the painting is incomplete.

The Lessons You Learn When You Create Your First Picture Book!

One lesson I’ve learned, after drawing and painting Buddy Butterfly several dozen times is this: plan and simplify your detailed characters before you start drawing. Even though I did some character sketches at the beginning of this project, I didn’t anticipate that drawing a butterfly with a segmented body and delicately veined wings would create a major time management problem. When I look at my images with dozens of flowers, trees with variegated coloring, skies with lacy clouds, butterflies with exactly 44 segments for all four wings, I realize why cartoons do not have crazy details in them — they take too much time.

Lesson learned. I’m curious to see how well I apply my brilliantly obvious insight to my next picture book, which will be done with pen and ink! But I’m getting distracted with future thinking. I’m going back to work now. I’ve still got 20 more pictures to color this week!

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Picture #26 digitally painted, Bernie hearing the noise in the wood-burning stove

Saturday is chore day. Between loading the washing machine and the clothes dryer I colored this image using my iPad Pro and Procreate. I used the the Frankentoon Nautika brushes for this image. In particular I like the Nautika Ink, Sponge Build-Up, and the Poster Marker. I use the Classic Inker for inking the line work. The color palette is from Frankentoon’s Crayon brush pack. Having a simple, coordinated color palette is a big deal for me.

I’m using Squarespace for this blog. All in all it’s an easy way to post quickly. It can auto-post to my Tumblr site. The only problem is that the images are not imported to Tumblr; there’s only a link back to the Squarespace image. This means that anyone logged to the Tumblr dashboard won’t see the any of the images unless they click on the link, which isn’t likely. Starting with this post I’m going to stop auto posting. I’ll have to go to Tumblr and manually update that blog. “What a drag!” said the lazy man.

Falling Down a Sooty Chimney

This drawing was colored with Affinity Photo on the iPad, then finished in Photoshop. I have to say that Photoshop is a really marvelous program. I wonder at times why I’m trying so hard to avoid it. Perhaps what really matters is that I run Photoshop on my 27-inch iMac, where everything is easier than on the iPad. I love the big, gorgeous screen. The one really big upside of Affinity Photo is that I also have the desktop version when I need it.

In this picture Jimmy has just jumped down the chimney to rescue his foolhardy friend, Buddy Butterfly.

Looks like I’ll have to change the color of Jimmy’s pants or the chimney.

Changing Horses Midsteam, Against My Own Advice

A few posts ago I pondered the foolishness of changing software in the middle of a project. Climbing the learning curve of a professional quality graphic editor is really spinning your wheels when you have a deadline. But I did it anyway.

I’m now using Affinty Photo for iPad to color my images. After some initial confusion and frustration, I was able to learn enough in one day to color several images. The irony is that I opened them in Photoshop to clean them up for this blog post.

So far I’m intrigued by Affinity Photo, but I have to say, it has an amazingly incomprehensible color picker. Something that should be drop-dead simple turns out to be mind-boggling. There are actually three color pickers, and they all seem to do something different! After an hour of fumbling and googling I found a way to pick colors, but it wasn’t with the color picker tool in the left sidebar, nor was it with the color picker in the color panel — I have no clue what those two color pickers do. The color picker in the brush color panel does work the way Photoshop’s color picker works…I think.

Today is the first day of my one-week vacation, which explains why there are two pictures in this post. Affinity Photo has a lot more brushes than I wanted to deal with today, so I created a simple round brush with 50% opacity, 5% flow, with size modulated by pressure — basically a marker brush. It worked great and was not at mysterious, puzzling, or baffling.

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