paint party friday

August 23, 2013 by Kat

A Sea of Green

Sometimes in the forest, I look up and feel as though I am under the surface. I can see where the term “canopy” in a forest comes from, because it feels as if there is a layer between me and the sky, sheltering me from the sun and rain. Who needs an umbrella or sunscreen? Not I.

For this piece, I wanted the leaves to be somewhat indistinct, forming a sea of green. All the better to highlight the shape of the trunk and the lines of the limbs, that gorgeous light sparkling through the canopy, and the feeling of being below the surface.

It’s been a while since I participated in Paint Party Friday, so I thought this would be a great one to share. I’m wishing you all a fun and creative weekend!

February 14, 2013 by Kat

Building on Backgrounds

I’ve started playing with creating digital pieces in a new way – building the final image onto a separate background rather than creating the background as a texture added to the photograph. I’m finding the background to be a versatile element, which can be used again and again.

For my Paint Party Friday post this week, I thought I would share how easy it is to create a painterly background with mobile apps, along with a few of the pieces created from the background.

To start a background, you need some sort of images that is mostly blank but has some texture or variation. I have started looking for these types of simple images in my daily photography… brick, stone, concrete, bark. All would have interesting texture.

For this example, I started with a Kim Klassen texture, Felicity, copied over to my iPad from my computer:

My first step was to use the Glaze app, to make it more painterly AND to increase the resolution. I love that you can save higher resolution than the original out of this app!

The output still felt a bit digital to me, so I ran the image through the Artista Oil app to add some more variation. I like this app for all of its options, both in painting styles and variation of strokes, etc.

Finally, the blending. Starting with the Glaze output as the base, to give the highest resolution file, I blended the output from Artista Oil in Image Blender to get the final background below:

Now I have a nice, painterly background with high resolution (4096×4096) to use for future creating. So far, I’ve used this background for four different pieces.

First, the original piece the background was created for. This is one of those pieces I mentioned earlier in the week that I liked when I shared it but a couple of days later I didn’t like it anymore. What I was trying to create originally didn’t work out, but I discovered this whole background idea so it was worth the time invested!

Next came one of my recent favorites, called Vanishing:

The third piece was another attempt with some of the same elements as the first one. I like this one better:

And finally, this last one, entitled “The earth’s secrets are held within a seed,” is another recent favorite:

While the color is similar between these pieces, due to the starting background, you probably wouldn’t notice they were all built on the same background layer if I hadn’t told you. As you build up and blend the other layers, the background changes and shifts from where it started. I could also easily shift the color of this background, and create a whole new look for the next piece.

I’ve created a couple of different backgrounds now and will continue to create and use them. They are proving to be a versatile element that adds a new dimension to my creative process. That’s the power of playing around: In the process of creating what might turn out to be a mess, you discover new ways of doing things.

February 7, 2013 by Kat

Liberate your Art 2013 & Watercolory Goodness

It’s time! It’s time! If you haven’t heard the news yet, it’s time to sign up for the Liberate Your Art 2013 postcard swap. The postcard receipt deadline is April 6 so you have plenty of time to create your postcards and get them mailed. Visit the swap page and sign up to get all of the details and helpful resources via email.

We are going to have a fantastic time this year! There are already 232 artists signed up. Yay! If the previous year’s participation rate holds true, I’m going to need more than 350 signed up to meet my goal of beating last year. I could use your help! Join us, and help me get the word out. Blog it, share the Facebook event, whatever the best way to contact your creative peeps.

For my Paint Party Friday post this week, I wanted to share a bit about a new app I’ve been playing with the last couple of weeks: Aquarella HD. This is a very cool watercolor app and I’m loving it!

First off, here’s a quick example of what the app can do… Original photo at left, painted version at right:

This app has lots of options. You can “paint” with the colors of your photo, or you can use two-tone effects as I’ve used for this one. It is amazingly customizable… you can change the colors used in the tones, the intensity of the color and the watercolor edge effects, the paper texture, the wash and background bloom. I love all of that control, as it allows me to create something I really love.

As always, I’ve been experimenting with combining it with other layers and apps to create an original piece. I’ve found I use the Aquarella HD app slightly differently than the other painting apps I have. For most other apps, I shift colors prior to adding the painterly effects. For this app, I’ve been creating the layers without worrying about color, because I’ll pick colors in the Aquarella HD app itself at the end.

Let me show you what I mean, with this finished piece, Moonrise:

I started with a photograph from several weeks ago, captured on a foggy morning:

I wanted the evergreen tree alone, so I used TouchRetouch to remove the tree and ground to the right:

I was also playing with the ArcMachines app last week, which is free app that creates circular geometric patterns. I had captured a couple of different images off of that:

Next, I played around with blending the circles with the tree image in Image Blender. When you are blending black and white images, the blending modes do interesting things. In this case, I think I was using either the Difference or Exclusion blending modes, which I don’t use with color. I moved the arrangement of the circle layer around until I liked where the circles were in relation to the tree:

The three circles weren’t packing the visual punch I wanted, so I added the large circle over the top one in Image Blender. I will note that for both of these steps, I needed to mask out the branches of the tree, so that the circles would appear to be behind the tree branches:

I played around with painting this version in Aquarella HD for a while, and while I got the colors and effect I liked painting-wise, the composition was not working out. So I went back to Image Blender and played with enlarging the layers. After several tries, I got a composition I liked:

Since I already had the painting effects set in Aquarella HD from my previous experimentation, I pulled this image in and processed it. As long as you don’t close out the app, your settings will stay the same when you pull in a new image. Very nice!

I named the piece “Moonrise” because my husband said it looked like the moon rising behind the tree with a couple of extra moons along for the ride.

Moonrise

My favorite thing about this painting is the light-in-dark effect happening within the circles. The watercolor edges really make that contrast pop. I’ve also discovered, or maybe rediscovered, that I really like combining geometric shapes with natural shapes like this, and this new app has created all sorts of possibilities. You can see a few more in my Flickr photostream.

It’s great to add one more painting app to my toolbox, and Aquarella HD is chock full of watercolory goodness. I just love creating art this way!

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 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 10, 2013 by Kat

And then the rain came…

Ah, yes. Rain. I live in Oregon, and yet I forget about the rain sometimes. We’ve had a good run of not-so-rainy weather and you know how I know? I had forgotten about puddle paintings! Until yesterday, when I was walking into work and the reflection of trees in puddles on the parking lot surface caught my eye. Really, it’s not like it’s been that long since it was rainy. I think I just have a short attention span!

Last night when I looked at the photos I was inspired to create this piece:

And then the rain came…

I’ll show you how it came together for this week’s Paint Party Friday post.

It starts with the captured image of a tree reflection in a parking lot puddle. I now use ProCamera for capturing most of my iPhone images. I like that I can switch between 1:1 and other aspect ratios in app and can easily separate the focus and exposure when needed. The “Anti-Shake” shutter is also really nice for avoiding blurry pics when the light is low… like if we have an overcast day or I’m in a shady forest or something. (Um, yeah, that’s pretty much all the time for me anymore.)

Then I pulled the photo into Snapseed to rotate and add some color and texture. I felt a bit blue yesterday.

From there, it was into texturing apps to play with textures and see what happened. I liked this one, from Distressed FX. Hey, my blue turned to green! But I really liked the effect.

I could have stopped there, but it was not quite as abstract and painterly as I wanted. So into the painting apps… Glaze, the Autopainter apps (HD, 2 and 3) to see what I could do with it. It’s interesting how some painting apps really work well for one type of image, and then don’t work at all for another. That’s the part about this whole digital painting thing that is full of play and experimentation. There is no precise process in this medium… it just doesn’t work that way.

Out of all of that play, I started with the output from Glaze as the base in Image Blender. I like to start with Glaze output as the base when I can, because the base sets the resolution for the final image. Since I save out of Glaze at the highest resolution (4096×4096), my final blended image is saved at the same resolution, which is larger than the native resolution of the iPhone 5 camera. This means I can print the final image as large as I might want.

From there, it was just blending of the different images I had created while playing in the different apps. I really can’t remember what I was blending with what, or the blending modes I was using. That’s all play too! But I’ll show you the intermediate blends so you can see how it progressed to the final piece.

Blend 1:

Blend 2:

Blend 3:

Final Image:

And then the rain came…

I love the abstraction of the final painting, the watery feel and the depth of color. Even though I started out in a blue mood, the green in this makes my heart sing.

I definitely don’t mind rainy days this winter. People have been wishing for spring, but I’m not asking for it to come yet. I am inspired by the reflections found in puddles, and the blank canvas provided by a grey sky. I’m getting out to hike regardless of the weather, or maybe because of the weather, as the rain and mist provides such atmosphere to the forest. I am grateful, every day, for this wonderful art form that inspires me so much.

Here’s a happy song that resonates with me right now. Enjoy!

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