Milestone - 5,000+ Pageviews for gatzkART!

A milestone has been made for gatzkART, today we posted over 5,000 Pageviews since March of 2009. Not bad for a relatively unknown Digital Visual Artist and Musicians blog. I have had the blog longer but did not begin using Google Analytics until then. So the number of visitors shows the visits to be closing on 4,000 but the actual Pageviews has been more.

Time to celebrate that milestone! What should I do? Create yet another post to gatzkART, of course.

Today's image is taken from a photograph of unknown origin. I want to give the photographer proper credit so if this photograph is familiar to you and you know who took it please post your comment!

I opened the photograph in Painter 8 and used more of the Painter 8 Wow! Book's brushes to replicate it with a painterly approach. I used oils, chalk, knives for texture, and Painter's own Digital Watercolor brushes for this piece. I was attempting a quick paint approach using the tools fairly fast and not going for a realistic view.

I applied the Filter Forge Freepack - Frames Grunge style frame to the painting in PhotoPaint. I also resized it for the web in PhotoPaint. Making it 1024x683 in size and compressing the jpg by 25 with smoothing set to 12.

I really like the expression on this gal's face and have done other permutations of this using vector art in CorelTRACE and CorelDRAW. The resulting image was striking and visually very different that this one.

I did some blues playing on my guitars yesterday. Using a technique that I garnered from a YouTube video. Very simple addition to my guitar playing. I also looked up the lyrics and chords for Staind's Tangled Up In You. It proved to be a simple chord structure but even with the 12-string I could not do the song justice in my style. They just plain did it better!