mobile tutorial

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!

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!

December 6, 2012 by Kat

Winter Flowers

There has been an interesting development for me lately. After months of not participating in Paint Party Friday, suddenly it’s getting difficult to decide just what to share! Now that I am considering my digital artwork to be “paintings” I find that I am creating too many to share just one day a week. Before, with traditional painting, I was doing good to pick up the brush most weeks. I think I have finally found my painting medium.

I have discovered another thing, the ones I want to share for Paint Party Friday have become the ones where I’d like to share how I created the final piece. It must be the teacher in me, but I get questions on how I did something and I can’t help but want to share with you so you can try it too. So here I go… with this week’s painting: Winter Flowers.

Winter Flowers

The painting starts off, as always for me, with a photograph. This was captured with my iPhone5 using the Slow Shutter Cam app, which allows you to mimic a long shutter speed. You can get some cool blur effects this way. Be forewarned though: You will have to experiment and take a lot of images to get one or two usable ones, but it’s worth it!

This image has some of the softness I was going for, but I wanted to enhance it further. I pulled it into the Glaze app and tried different glazes. This was my favorite:

Do you see the subtle color shifts that happened, along with the painterly edges? It seemed to deepen the shadows and make for a more dimensional image. Very cool. I didn’t like the regular looking brushstrokes that happened along the petals though. Time to pull it into the Iris Photo Studio app, and blend it back with the original photo:

This adds a little bit more structure back into the lines and brightens things up, but it didn’t get rid of the regular looking brustrokes, so there was one more step. I opened the image in Pixlr Express PLUS and applied a texture. The great thing about this app, as opposed to the similar and simpler Pixlr-o-Matic from the same company, is that you can adjust the amount of the effect that is applied. So I toned down the texture a little bit to make it more subtle. Here’s the final image again:

Winter Flowers

I am really happy with how this one turned out! I am going to print it to see how it looks on paper. I hope you are enjoying these and starting to get some ideas for creating digital art this way. The possibilities are endless, and tons of fun!

Oh, and if you don’t have a smartphone to join in with all of this app fun, I’ve run into a couple of options online to play with editing your photos this way. Check out pixlr.com and psykopaint.com. Have fun!

November 29, 2012 by Kat

Rain Painting

I seem to be in a monochromatic mood with my recent work! I’m creating with very simple color schemes including a lot of black. Maybe it’s the change of the season… after so much bright color with the leaves I am enjoying the toned down color of winter.

This week for Paint Party Friday I thought I would share this recent piece of digital art, Rain Painting, along with how I created it:

Rain Painting

I shared a square version of this work over the weekend through Instagram, but I really like the rectangular version so much better! It seems to emphasize the tall trees and painterly feel.

OK, so how did I create it… First, I started with this image, taken out a rainy window from the backseat of our car last Friday:

Photographing from a car is always a challenge, because you have to act quickly to frame and capture whatever is there. I think using a camera phone helps because I could get it set up and then anticipate the photograph by watching the trees that were coming up ahead. I liked this right out of the camera, but wanted to add more texture and warmth to it, so I first took the image through the Pixlr Express PLUS app to shift the color and add a texture:

I also wanted to add a more painterly feel, so I took the original photo through the Glaze app to create this version:

Finally, I took all three images, original, textured and glazed, and combined them using the Iris Photo Suite app. I don’t remember the blending modes or percentages I used, though! Blending images is typically a one-time thing, just playing around with modes and percentages until the combination looks right. And here’s the final version again:

Rain Painting

I like how it turned out. It brings me a moody, wet feeling – kind of like a rainy day. Winter has definitely arrived in Oregon!

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