digital painting

January 12, 2017 by Kat

Where I’ve been… Where I’ll be

So, I’ve been a bit missing online this fall. Part of it has been a creative slump, which I’ve been pulling out of with my digital painting. Part of it has been my new job, taking on a management role again. But there is one more part I haven’t talked about here… and that’s the part about me becoming a mentor for my son’s FIRST Robotics team.

If you’ve never heard of FIRST, it’s a great program… In the Robotics Challenge, high school teams from around the world design and build robots to compete with each other. Each year is a unique game and challenge. This year’s game is called Steamworks and involves robots collecting and placing gears, collecting and delivering balls to high and low goals, and climbing ropes.

My son Brandon is a sophomore in high school and this is his second year on Team 997 Spartan Robotics. Last year, he wasn’t so sure about it. It’s a HUGE time commitment. The “build season” is 6 weeks from start to finish, with the new game released each year in early January. Teams start designing and building after kickoff in January, and complete the robot by mid-February. It’s 5 meetings a week, after school and on Saturdays, because designing an building a functional robot from scratch is not an easy task.

And, as we learned last year in his first season, it’s an amazing experience for the kids who participate. For me, working as an engineering professional for 24 years, it’s the best thing I’ve seen in high school to prepare kids for the real world of work. They learn an amazing range of things:

Working as a team to accomplish a goal
Time management and prioritization of both school work and robotics work
Working together and being professional under stressful situations
Adapting to unanticipated problems and changes
And oh yeah, they learn about engineering, business, and marketing along the way.

Pretty darn cool.

I started mentoring this fall, focusing with the team leadership on project management. In the fall, the team participated in an informal competition called BunnyBots, which serves as training and practice for the real season to come. They didn’t think they could meet the schedule… but they did awesome – they were part of the championship alliance, winning the day! You can watch the final championship Bunnybot match here. Look for the bright blue robot with 997 on it, that’s our team’s robot named “Hermes.”

But that was just practice. This last weekend, the real season started. January 7 the game was released and build season is officially under way. It’s pretty much non-stop until February 18th.

Here’s the team on kickoff day. I’m in there, way in the back. We were even covered in our local newspaper (see if you can spot my son!).

So, yeah, my artistic output has dropped off dramatically since Saturday. I’m sure it will come back as we get into the swing of things. Right now I’m having fun seeing these kids do amazing things, enjoying the front row seat in my son’s development into adulthood, and hoping that I’ll have a little bit of impact on developing some future engineers.

March 22, 2013 by Kat

Radiating Beauty

I love it when a plan comes together! When I captured this photograph of lotus flowers*, I knew immediately I wanted to do a painterly edit. No doubt this desire was influenced by my love of Monet’s water lily paintings!

So I was thrilled yesterday morning when I played with the image and came up with this final result. Perfect timing to share with Paint Party Friday too!

I love the way everything seems to radiate out from the grouping of flowers. There is an energy I feel when I look at it, even though the edit softens things up. It’s dynamic and yet beautiful at the same time.

* What flower I actually photographed seems to be up for debate. There is a difference between lotus and water lilies, but I don’t know enough to tell. All I know is the native Singaporeans I was with called these lotus. Does anyone know the answer? Here’s the original photo for more clarity.

One more parting note: I will be doing a giveaway of a space in my upcoming A Sense of Place online class in my email newsletter coming out this weekend. Be sure to sign up for the newsletter if you aren’t already a subscriber, so you can enter.

January 24, 2013 by Kat

My Blank Canvas

Winters in Oregon can wear on you. Depending on the year, you can have weeks upon weeks without direct sunlight. It can wear on you after a while. Through my creative explorations I’ve discovered an amazing thing this winter, though. The flat, grey skies of Oregon winter are a wonderful blank canvas, when captured with my camera. I can paint any color I want onto them!

With that in mind, I’ll share with you how I created this week’s digital painting for Paint Party Friday:

Even in the winter, there is still light

It started with this photograph. It has interesting branches but is a bit underexposed. See what I mean about the flat, grey sky? Bleah.

Next into Snapseed, for some color shifting. I don’t even bother to try and adjust exposure before I start this process. I’ll do that later if needed. The final image out of snapseed was shifted to blue with a bit of a vignetting around the edges, creating a brighter region in the middle. Do you see it? I liked how the branches seemed to be framing this lighter spot.

Next into a new app I got this week, PhotoCopier. This app creates some interesting color shifts and textures based on famous works of art. I liked the added texture it gave to the image, along with some more color shift.

I wanted to add variation at this point. The sky was still too flat! I used Pixlr Express PLUS to add this inked frame. I was playing around with frames in the app earlier this week, which I almost never use, and discovered these cool watercolor-y frames. Perfect to add some more dimension here, along with a little bit of color as well.

Time to try some more texture, pulling it into Distressed FX. This is one of my go to texture apps. I love some of the effects! The two textures I liked best shifted the color to green. If all my paintings come out green these days, it’s this app’s fault! I need to play around with shifting the colors back. Here are the two textured ones I liked:

Looking at these I realized the Aquarell filter in Autopainter HD would go well. I like the watercolor effect of this app, it’s the best I’ve tried, but I don’t always like how it leaves such a wide unpainted border around the edges. In this case, because I had darkened the edges so much with the border, I thought it would blend really well.

Finally, it was time to blend it all up! Using Image Blender, I blended variations of the different images I’ve shown you. Here’s the part I can never quite remember… which images, blending modes and opacities I used to get the final place. It’s a lot of experimentation. Suffice it to say that I try out all sorts of blending modes and opacities with each of the layers I’m blending to get a look that I like.

Here’s the final painting, again:

Even in the winter, there is still light

While I’ve found a great use for the grey skies this winter, can I have some sun now, please?

January 22, 2013 by Kat

Quiet Power

Do you know, are you an introvert or extrovert? Do you get energy from being alone, or being with other people? I am on the introvert side, definitely. I need my quiet time and my space. I thrive with a good amount of solitude, and time to think. I will always choose small group interaction versus a big party. Add to that a serious case of shyness when I was younger, and I always felt I didn’t fit. I felt that there was something wrong with me, because I didn’t quite meet up to the social expectations around me. I remember as a teenager, being parts of a group activity or mixer, and discovering later no one remembered I was there. I felt invisible. But I knew, deep down, there was more to me, if someone would just take the time to look.

This feeling extended on into college and the working world. Thankfully, I chose to go to a private university with small classes in general and a tiny, fledgling engineering program. I got to know my fellow engineering majors well, because there were so few of us and we spent so much time together. One of my friends from college described me in this way: “You’re like a red hot chili pepper in a cool green salad,” he said, “You think you know what you are going to get and then OUCH! You take a bite.” I loved that description, because it was as if someone had finally seen me. The real me, hidden inside the quiet, calm exterior.

But in each new situation I had to start again. I don’t think I said a word in a meeting my first year in the working world. Not one word. It’s amazing they kept me there! Slowly, slowly I learned to fit into this extroverted world I was living in. I gained experience, I gained confidence, and I gained a thicker skin. I learned to balance my alone time with social time, but I always felt a tension because I had the need for quiet time to think and recuperate. As if I was somehow less, for the need of it. I kept wishing that I could be the life of the party.

All of this comes up because I watched this TEDtalk from Susan Cain last week on the Power of Introverts:

I was in tears by the end of it. It felt as if she had finally validated who I was. That I was ok. That the quiet teenager and young adult I had been, the introvert I still am, is just a different kind of normal. That there is a benefit in being an introvert, not just a downside. There is a benefit to the time I need to think and explore. I can see that in my art, and here too, in my writing. I can see the time I spend in my head, the time I spend alone creating… that time helps my ideas come together into something bigger than myself. Something I can share with others.

Susan Cain gave this message to introverts in her talk, “The world needs you and it needs the things you carry.” I felt as if she were talking directly to me. Maybe the world doesn’t always need the life of the party. Maybe the world sometimes needs what comes out of the quiet power of deep thought. Maybe the world needs what I have to offer. As me, the introvert. I only needed to find a way to comfortably allow these ideas to come out. Which I have, through this blog. It allows me, bit by bit, day by day, to reveal the red hot chili pepper that resides within the cool green salad, which I’d never feel comfortable doing all at once with a big “ta-da!” There is a reason you don’t see me in video here or in my classes. It’s not just because I feel uncomfortable in front of the camera, although there is a little bit of that, it’s mostly because I love the time and space of writing and how it helps my ideas to form. It’s my medium, as much as photography. Both allow me to think and to process before I share.

Regardless of whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, I encourage you to watch the video. And think about how things play out in your life, your environment, your culture. In this age of bold personality, see if you can help encourage someone who doesn’t fit that mold to explore their quiet power. That someone may even be you.

January 17, 2013 by Kat

A Lesson in Simplicity

Hello and happy Thursday! It’s been a busy week for me. Lots of little loose ends to tie up, much of it has seemed to center around prep for exhibitions and framing. Someday, when I get framing all figured out to my liking, I’ll share what I’ve learned. I’ve got creating and printing under my belt now, but framing! Ugh!

For this week’s Paint Party Friday post I wanted to share one of my favorite recent paintings, Reaching Toward the Sun, and the little lesson I learned from it. This one is a lesson in simplicity.

Reaching Toward the Sun

It all started on a crisp and sunny Saturday afternoon. Walking back from a relaxing visit to the local coffee shop with my son, I noticed these wonderful dead plants along the path. They were so lacy and delicate, standing tall in the sun even after they had lived their life, I had to play. I spent a while trying to capture their beauty, sending my son on home ahead of me because he was getting bored waiting. It’s nice to have an older kid now. 🙂

Composition was challenging with a fence and convenience store right behind the plants, but isn’t that always the way of photography? Sometimes you have to work for that perfect shot. Of the bunch, I loved the gently curving lines of the stalks and the way the sun highlighted the details in this one:

OK, so now it’s time to play. I’ll walk you through some of the different options I tried:

The blue sky in the original was pretty but a little too blue. I wanted to soften up the color but still keep that glowing sun. I played around with several options in Snapseed (top row). When I come across an effect I think I like as I play, I always save the image to the camera roll. I have no idea if I will use it later, but I want to remember as I’m playing what came before. You never know what you might want later!

Next it was time to play with effects. The first two in the second row were from the original photo processed through decim8, a really cool app that creates interesting modern/digital effects, but it was not what I was going for with this piece. I needed soft!

So then it was into the painting apps. All of those shown are from Autopainter HD or Autopainter II. I tried painting with both the original photograph and the edited blue-green photograph. I liked the blue-green ones the best. (There are more painting experiments in my camera roll, I could only fit a few here.)

Now that I had some good options and ideas for direction, I pulled the blue-green image into Image Blender and started to play.

It quickly became obvious that the seed head at the bottom of the frame, which hadn’t bothered me in the original photo, was just going to be a distraction in the final painting. So I pulled the blue-green image into TouchRetouch and quickly edited out. This is a super simple app that works great for quick corrections like this. Doesn’t that look better?

Now that I had a new photo, I needed to go back through and recreate the painted layers. Since I had already narrowed down my direction through earlier experimentation, I only recreated a few of the layers that I thought I might want to use, and started blending.

The first blend I did was the blue-green image with this watercolor layer:

And guess what? That first blend became my final image:

Reaching toward the Sun

After playing some more I realized that first blend captured exactly what I wanted, the soft colors, the sun on the stalks, with the gentle, painterly feel. It was a lesson in simplicity. After spending the last few weeks blending many, many layers to finish a piece, I realized sometimes you don’t need that. Something simple will do. Just like every photograph doesn’t need to become a digital painting, every digital painting doesn’t need to be complex. The experimentation was all good though, it helped me refine my artistic vision and really be clear about what I want to communicate in the final piece so I could make choices accordingly.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s lesson in simplicity! It’s also this week’s “mobile tutorial.” I’ve created a page on the blog sidebar under the Resources heading called “Mobile Apps, Tutorials and Resources” and you can find a link to all of these little tutorials there, along with some web resources and (eventually) a list of apps I recommend. I’ve gotten a lot of questions from readers as I’ve explored this new medium and I want to make it easy for you to find the information I’m sharing as I learn. Let me know if you have any questions. Maybe the answers will pop up in one of these posts!

January 3, 2013 by Kat

Blending to Perfection

When you are creating, do you find moments when everything comes together and it just feels right? Your know your piece is finished. When you are new to a medium, it’s not as easy. You may not take something far enough or you may go too far, ruining something good. As you learn and progress, I think it’s easier to know when something is “done.” It’s part of the learning process, and our own style, to develop that feeling of done.

In mobile/digital art, I’ve learned that the name of the game is blending. Using multiple apps and blending them together, until it feels “done.” I had already started on this path, as I created some of my earlier pieces like Rain Painting and Winter Flowers. I had only touched the tip of the iceberg of what is possible with blending in those, however. I’m going crazy now. Today as I share one of this week’s pieces for Paint Party Friday I thought I would also give you a taste of the kind of blending I’m doing now, and how I created this one, called Under the Surface.

Here’s the starting image, taken with the ProCamera app. I love it! You can easily separate exposure and focus, and switch between aspect ratios within the app, going from square to rectangular.

Then the fun started. I’ve created this little matrix of images to walk through the process of creation, but it doesn’t even cover all of the steps. To be honest, I get so many layers going I don’t even remember the exact steps but I’m trying to recreate them to share.

From left to right, top to bottom:

The first step was into Snapseed, to shift the color a bit. This also added some texture and vignetting.
Next I pulled that image into Distressed FX to add textures. The next three are the image with various textures added. You can’t add more than one texture within the app, so I save an image of each texture I like on the photo. Distressed FX also will do color filters in addition to textures, but I often turn that off and just use the textures. It’s become my go-to app for textures lately.
From there, I start to blend. The center image is a blend of the different texture images I saved out of Distressed FX. I’ve starting using the Image Blender app for blending, because it is easier to use and has more blending options than Iris Photo Suite. When blending, I just play with the blending modes and percentages until it looks good to me. There is no logical sequence I’ve got for this step.
Once I had a nice blend, I started to use the painting apps. I take the blended photo into the apps and play around with different effects to get some I like. Middle right is the “Aquarell” painting filter from Autopainter HD (a recent favorite) and bottom left is from Glaze.
From there I started blending again, with the textured image and the painted images. Bottom middle is the new blend.
I was starting to lose the colors, so I took that blend back through Distressed FX and added a filter or two.

From there, I did more blending with previously created layers to get the final result.

Under the Surface

There were more steps and layers than these I shared, but it gives you the basic idea of how the final piece was created. There is a depth of color and texture in the final painting that is built through blending layers which won’t exist when you use a single app. It’s really the creative part of the process, and where the unique touch of each person will come in. I’ve started to learn the apps, what works on different images and how to achieve a certain look, as I play. Eventually I might develop a “style” but right now it’s all about play and exploration. Lots of fun!