What Did You Feed Me? - Painter 11 - Pencils - Watercolors

Here is another of the 50+ photographs I took of my Grandson recently. As you can see by his expression he did not like the taste of the pasta that he was just fed. Hence the title "What Did You Feed Me?"

I opened the photograph in Painter 11 and applied an equalization to it to lighten it up. I quick cloned the large file and began with the Pencil cloner on the hair. I varied the size of the Pencil and did more of the face and shirt, hands, and shading.

I also used the Watercolor brushes and the Filbert brush on the piece. I added some more to the image with the Digital Watercolor brushes. The heavy shadows come from my non-filtered flash of the Canon Rebel fixed flash. I need to buy a filter for it to soften the harsh shadows it makes. But that is another story.

I saved the file and opened it in PhotoPaint where I adjusted the Tone Curve to lighten up the tones. I did no saturation adjustments at this time as I like the way the tones turned out. I applied the resample to adjust the image size for sharing here.

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Now playing: Kirk Mathew Gatzka - Smooth Ride-DADGAD-4th fret
via FoxyTunes

Curly Haired Young Lady Portrait - Painter 11

The image today started with another portrait from the WetCanvas galleries. This young woman has very curly hair and a pleasant demeanor.

I browsed in Picasa 3 and located this image then I opened with Painter 11. I applied the Quick Clone to set up the tracing paper for painting the image. I began with the Pencil cloner for the hair to imitate the curls. I switched to the Oil Bristle cloner for the face and neck and dress. This gave me an impasto quality to those portions.

Using the Soft cloner I added the eyes, eyebrows and mouth for finer detail. I used the Camel cloner to go over the hair and fill it in, adding the background with it and the Soft cloner for the drapery and wall paper details.

I used the Pencil cloner for the eyes to give them a more painterly appearance. And used the Soft Cloner to add back in detail to the curly hair, especially the crown and edges, which shows much more detail.

I am still using the Tracing Paper as I am just now getting used to Painter 11. I will journey further away from this as I develop more courage and confidence in my painting abilities.

This second image is from playing with different Brushes and the Image Hose and Textures for a fun exercise in Painter 11.

As you can see it has a variety of Brushes and the Image Hose can add realism to any painting. I did use many new brushes I downloaded that are not native to Painter 11. I painted the yellow orange flowers and foliage with some and then used other watercolor brushes for the sky.

In any event it was an enjoyable experiment with the new tools of Painter 11.

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Now playing: Acoustic Junction - Strange Days
via FoxyTunes

Self-Portrait - Painter 8 - Paint.NET - PhotoPaint

I rarely do self-portraits but I like the smile in the eyes and mouth from this photograph taken by my wife. I opened it in PhotoPaint and cropped it to only myself, then I resampled it to 96dpi to increase the size of the working image.

From here I opened the saved file in Painter 8 and used the Wow! Book Oil brushes on Auto Clone for the muck up. I painted back in details using the Soft Clone brush. I added the impasto effect to the background. I saved this and opened in Paint.NET.

There I created a duplicate layer and applied Pencil Sketch to that layer and changed it's property to Multiply. Using Adjustments Curves I darkened and increased depth of the pencil sketch. I merged the layers and saved the file again.

Back in PhotoPaint I applied the Tone Curves yet again for additional depth and upped the color saturation by 15, boosting the colors. With Filter Forge's Frames I added the frame to finish the piece. I used the wand to select the frame and applied the Effects> Texture> Plastic> for a 3d look.

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!

A quick bit of art

WetCanvas an artists forum I belong to had an October challenge for Digital Art. I selected a portrait by Joycleynsart, it was one of the challenge images.

I brought it into Corel's PhotoPaint and used the Image>Transform>Threshold to make the black portion of the image. Emphasizing the light on the face was the theme.

I made a duplicate and filled it with black, then using Harry's filters plug in I added a color gradient to the filled duplicate.

I switched back to the original and copied it. Then I pasted the copy into the filled color gradient. Using it as an object I then adjusted the Properties to Multiply, which gave me the black only. I then flattened the image to add the blackened areas.

I ended up with the piece shown here.