Two Young Ladies - Painter 8 Wow! Book Brushes

This painting is done in Painter 8 based on a work I did some time ago reworked in Painter. I titled it "Pucker" because the lips are slightly puckered.

I used Painter 8 Wow Book's acrylic brushes and grainy brushes for this piece. I took the eyes, eyebrows and lips from the original image using the soft cloner brush for details. As I also highlighted the buttons that frame the image with the soft cloner.

I wanted to do some more painting with Painter 8 so I approached this image from that perspective. I did used PhotoPaint to increase the dpi to 96 and sharpen the original. Then used the stamp tool with the selected brushes described above. It is more painterly than some of my other pieces of work, but that was the goal.

The second image is from a photograph taken by my son Keir M. Gatzka. I opened the image in Paint.NET to apply the oil painting filter for my underpainting. I saved it as a tif file format. And I applied the Curves to it to deepen the color and shadows.

I reopened it in Painter 8, using the Wow! Book brushes I painted the piece with another broad based underpainting and then added details with finer oil brushes. I love the realism in this image as I usually go for a looser feel. I really like the smile of this young lady.

I saved the tif file and opened it in PhotoPaint. I only added the grunge frame using Filter Forge's Freepack - Frames again along with my signature. Converting it to jpg for display here.

I worked on a song titled, "Pages Without Numbers" yesterday. I recorded a simple vocal and 12-string guitar with a background vocal as well in Audacity. I used two vocal settings for my PG58 Shure microphone in the Gearbox software from Line 6. One was a Detroit R&B vocal for the guitar and background, and the other one for the main vocal - Bright and Clean. I'm not truly satisfied with the recording as I listen to it today. It is kind of muddy sounding on the background vocal. I need to re-record it for clarity.

Listening --- Pages Without Numbers --- Kirk Mathew Gatzka