"How To: Hills, Mountains, Cloudy Skies Oils Plus" Corel

Hills, Mountains, Cloudy Skies

These are the Programs and settings I used to create today's image. I am still experimenting with the outline format. Please let me know if you prefer this format or a Narrative Style format explaining how to use the stated Programs. Comments welcome!

• Corel Painter Essentials 5
  • Landscape – Hills, Mountains, Cloudy Skies
    • Effects
      • Tonal Control
        • Increased Saturation
    • Select Oil Painting
      • Acrylics and Oils
        • Real Wet Brush
        • Size 25
        • Opacity 100%
        • Freehand Brush setting
        • Artists Rough Paper
        • Paint with these settings
    • Select Detailed Watercolor
      • Still using Real Wet Brush
        • Size 10.2
        • Opacity 82%
        • Straight Brush
        • Same Paper setting
        • Paint with these settings
        • Stop before complete for just light effect
    • Select Colored Pencil Drawing
      • Pencils, Pens and Markers
        • Dry Ink Brush
        • Freehand Strokes
        • Size 31.5
        • Opacity 24%
        • Grain 100%
        • Same Paper setting
        • Paint with these settings
        • Stop before complete for just light effect
• Corel PSP Pro X3
  • Adjust
    • Smart Photo Fix
      • Brighter 32
      • Shadows -10
      • Highlights -5
      • Saturation 50
      • Focus- Original 47
    • Opened Signature
      • Placed as new layer
      • Sized to fit
      • Merged all Layers; Added 10 pixel Black Border

This photograph was from the Morguefile Free Photos. I truly appreciate their sharing some very good compositions for Digitally Painting and adjusting.

"Young Woman - Mountain Map" Corel

Young Woman - Mountain Map

I found some Public Domain Maps through a search. The one I used today in this image is a Comparison of Mountains from all around the World. I opened the Young Woman's portrait in Corel PSP Pro X3 and applied the Threshold tool. I turned that into largely into white space. I wanted to go light and not dark with this image.

I copied and pasted the Mountain Comparative Map onto her and played with the properties. I came out with one I liked. I also upped the Saturation Vibrancy of the Map for more distinct color. I added a black border to set it off along with my signature as a layer. I merged all layers and saved the large iteration.

I tried experimenting with the Export; JPG file settings but the higher I set the compression the more it pixelated the image. I just Resized it and saved as normal JPG, display size.

Alaskan Mountains - Watercolor - Painter 11 - PhotoPaint

Here is an image that is done in Watercolor in Painter 11. I browsed our photographs from our Alaskan trip a couple of years ago and found many good mountain based ones. I browsed to this one in Picasa 3, and opened with Painter 11.

I did a quick clone and selected the watercolor brushes. Clicking on the clone button I adjusted the opacity and saturation for each layer of the foreground and subsequent mountain layers. I painted at first with the fine watercolor then the larger brushes. I was using the large photograph so the brushes moved slowly at times, as is the case with watercolor.

I also selected the Gouache brush for the sky, as in the photograph it was mostly white and very light blue. I added some blue with a Whitewater brush to the piece for added depth. I saved the file as a jpg for use in PhotoPaint.

Opening it in PhotoPaint I added Filter Forge's watercolor frame , narrowing it and changing the color to a sky blue. I also squared off the corners more, less rounded. Here I resampled the larger image for display on the internet. I also adjusted with the Tone Curve to lighten up the image.

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Now playing: Alan Parsons Project - Eye In The Sky
via FoxyTunes

Alaskan Landscape - Painter 8 Oils

This is one of my favorite photographs I took on our visit to Alaska. I like the trees and brush in the foreground and the mountains in the distance, with a touch of river water in the composition.

I used Paint.NET to apply the Ink Sketch filter for some linework. Saving that file I opened it in Painter 8 and using the Oils brushes I painted the image you see here. As I did with the Acrylic brushes I selected differing brushes for the sky, mountains, trees, brush and sand and river, but all were oil brushes. I used the Surface Effects Original Luminance for the textured strokes.

I worked with a larger file but opened it in PhotoPaint to use the Tone Curve and Saturation for the coloring. This is part of my workflow to add depth and a slight increase in color. I then resized it for web display to 681x1024 pixels.

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Now playing on Windows Media Player: Blues Traveler - The Mountains Win Again
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Alaskan Mountains - Late Summer - Painter 8

Using Corel's Painter, Digital painting is very much fun. You start with a subject and you select your brushes, in this case Acrylic and Digital Watercolor, and you paint. Using the tracing paper function allows you to duplicate nicely the composition you have selected in your original photograph of the subject matter.

In Digital you can adjust so many things that you feel will add to your image and you can try them, but if they don't work, you have the undo feature which you don't have using traditional media.

I selected another photograph taken by myself of the Alaskan mountains North of Anchorage. There were predominately gray colors for the foreground which I altered, in PhotoPaint, using Image> Adjust> Hue / Saturation / Lightness. I increased the saturation by about nine. Now the colors are tinted and have more depth to them.

I try and vary my subject matter in my Digital Artworks for the blog to keep it fresh. I am also doing more Digital Painting for a change and this leads to pieces like today's.

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Now playing on Windows Media Player: Jeremy Fryc - if you put two v's close enough together they make a w
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Power Outage Shuts Down gatzkART Temporarily

Because of a fallen tree here locally I was made painfully aware of the dependency we have on electricity. We experienced a Power Outage because of that fallen tree - for hours.

It took all afternoon and part of the evening to have the electric power restored. With little extra time to spend going to a local Starbucks or other wifi hubspot I was unable to post to my blog. So I had to wait till time and power made it possible once again to connect and post.

I am using another Photograph of Alaskan mountains for my image today. I used PhotoPaint to take a previously used photo and make a new piece. It is one of my favorite photographs of the mountains I took.

I cropped the photo to make it less centered and moved the far mount off center. I used KPT's Collection Pyramid Paint filter for a painterly look and then I took the image through the Thredgeholder for a sketchy appearance. I copied that to the clipboard and undid the action. Pasting it back onto the image as an object I used the Object property Color Burn to add it with transparency. This gave me lines and details.

I masked the mountains out and used the 3D Effect> Glass on the sky. I upped the color saturation by about fifteen to enhance the colors. I also lightened the image using the Tone Curve adjustment just a bit.

I am happy that the power is back on and I am online again for today. It was very different day without being online.

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Now playing on Windows Media Player: Kirk Mathew Gatzka - Photographs
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Missing the Alaskan Mountains - Painter 8

Though it's a nice day here I am reminiscing about last years visit to Alaska. I am missing the mountains and the beauty of the area we were visiting.

Here is a piece I did in Painter 8, using acrylics brushes and watercolor brushes. I added a texture to it in PhotoPaint as it had the type of texture I wanted. Painter allows you to texturize as well but I used PhotoPaint in this instance.

This photograph that I used was on our second day trip South from Anchorage toward Homer. It was a cloudy day with a little rainfall. So I took a few photographs through the windshield. I have many photographs from that trip. So many it is hard to select which one to use to paint.

I have been reading some music blogs lately and waiting for the inspiration to hit me for working on some new songs. I sent my brother, in Alaska, four Audio CD's with my work and a few covers of older songs for their collection. I'd like to do a greatest hits CD with the best of my work and covers but I don't have a big enough fan base to make one, I don't know which ones are the best ones. I need to share with a broader base, but find that family and friends are they best ones for right now. I am not actively seeking to promote my songs. So I guess a greatest hits CD is a way off for now.

I haven't been playing my 12-string guitar much lately, as I turn to digital painting again. Painting takes time. So my time has been there.

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Now playing on Windows Media Player: Crocodile Dundee - Opening Title Theme
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An Overcast Day Near Cook's Inlet

An overcast day driving toward Seward. Surrounded by mountains and waters it was beautiful though cloudy.

This is a heavily cropped photograph going south from Anchorage. I was the only one to see the tailfin's of a Beluga whale. No one else could verify it for me! I stand alone.

I put together another song yesterday. I used a chord progression I had used before but played it to a drum backbeat. A little up tempo backbeat with a slower chord strumming to it. I found an old song that I had not liked the chords and melody to and took the lyrics and fit them to the different progression. The melody is very Rock-like. Simple yet strong.

I started a new round of songs for a CD this one I've named "Fifth Time Around." As I have created enough music for at least four CDs. Now a Fifth one is growing.

Chord progressions and leads are coming fairly well but new lyrics and melodies are harder. Whe I was younger I was pretty prolific with lyrics and poetry. As a more mature person you'd expect I would have more to write about, but it doesn't always come out like it used to.

Inspiration is the best but most of it is persperation instead!

I am also limited to open chords and I avoid Barre chords, I have small hands and i'm playing the 12-string and it is just plain harder to barre 12 strings cleanly.

So I relish in learning new open chords like C2 and Asus2, G6 and others. Then to make them into a nice progression is a challenge I enjoy. Bridges are elusive as well. They can be so different, yet have to keep to the songs overall development, as to pose some difficulites.

A Man and His Dog

A man and his dog on a cutoff in the mountains. I tried to make a better image with the addition of a sky but it appears that the Pyramid Paint filter made it look too dark.

So I think it looks doctored up. But it was fun to do and so I am sharing it.

I've been working on a mapping project with a friend. So it is an interesting challenge to formulate the maps from resources. It is mostly cutting and pasting and adding street names that don't appear on the resource map.

I've been listening to music, too. Some of my older songs that I may remake using the Toneport to see if I can add an edge to them, or soften them a bit. I may add background vocals as well as some lead playing, although I'm not your best lead player! It's all in fun anyway. And there are always covers to do of other songwriters works.

I've received an invitation to an Opening Reception for the Michigan Plein Air Painters exhibition coming up on November 7th. http://www.michiganpleinair.com/ The show runs until Nov. 29th. It's being held at the Huron Valley Council for the Arts in Highland, Michigan. Not too far from us. The invitation was a large sized postcard with six images of plein air paintings, all very well done. We hope to go to the reception but if not we may go to the exhibition at a later date.

Gravel Beach and Mountains

More mountains! I have many differing images of them. They were so impressive in person, I have to say that it is hard to have a representation of them that do them justice.

I heavily cropped this photo as the gravel river beach was taking up a third of it. I again was using PhotoPaint to make my adjustments. I used KPT's Collection Pyramid Paint filter and increased the saturation by about 7 to boost the colors.

I decided to do a couple of covers of songs from songwriters that impressed me for my CD Beginnings. So I added two Beatles songs Norwegian Wood and Eleanor Rigby and John Sebastian's Daydream and, of course, Mr. Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan. I really enjoyed doing these songs as they hold many memories.

Many of the 60's and early 70's songwriters are my favorites as they helped me learn how to play guitar as I imitated them and played their songs over and over again to impress on my mind the chord progressions and the lyrics. All of course 'unplugged' on a Harmony acoustic guitar. My parents, you see, did not want to buy me an electric guitar. So I saved my money and got a Woody Seymour Duncan pickup for the acoustic and a small amplifier and had fun using tremelo and feedback, when they weren't home!

I remember one summer day when no one was home I opened the garage door and plugged in. I had all the dogs in the area howling! This disturbed the neighbors and they called the police on me.

So I received a visit from the local police who politely asked me to turn it down. So much for trying out feedback with tremelo on the amp! Back then the police were very sympathetic and nice about it. Today I doubt that they are as things have gotten worse in society. So I counted myself fortunate to have only a brief encounter and a good result from that day. It's actually a good memory.

Just a quick stop by the blog to post. I have been looking through my photographs of mountains and I found this one of an old bridge with the mountains in the background.

I opened the image in Corel's PhotoPaint and I made some adjustments to it. First I upped the saturation by 11 keeping the hue and lightness the same.

I then used KPT' Collection Pyramid Paint filter on it to give it a watercolor appearance.

I like the way the old bridge gives the eye a way to move around the image, at a slight angle. But the horizon is level as you move beyond the bridge to the mountains and river behind.

I have other mountain photographs I may post here as well.

Two Trees with Mountains

Here is a photograph taken with my Canon Rebel XTi while visiting Alaska. I used the AF with Landscape selected. I am still learning this camera so many of my current photos are an automatic setting, changing only from portrait to macro to landscape, etc.

It's versatility amazes me and I am very content with it's quality and the images I get from it.

I have been using my Toneport UX1 quite a bit for writing and recording songs and doing some covers. It really pushes the envelope of my musical abilities. I haven't played much in groups so it is really interesting to get some real drum loops off of the net and play along with them to create songs with a backbeat.

I have been able to download some free drum loops from Jim Dooley's site at http://www.dooleydrums.com/free_drum_loops.php. Using Audacity the free recording program I import the loop and create a string of them of up to 3-4 minutes or so and then try my best to match the beat, like using a metronome of a real drum sound. It is really enjoyable and a challenge for me. Jim offers all his drum loops and samples for about $29.99, which I hope to purchase some time. In the mean time - Thanks, Jim Dooley!

Toneport offers so many preset guitar styles that it is so much fun to select various types and explore what my acoustic 12-string guitar can sound like electronically. The accompanying software Gearbox has many presets of styles and mix and match amplifier presets that you can create some really wayout sounds with an acoustic guitar with a Woody Seymour Duncan pickup stuck in the soundhole.

It is really just plain fun!

Today I entered a competition based on the theme of "Water" online. This is one of three images I was allowed to enter. Each image was taken with my Canon XTi camera. I really like this version of Canon's Rebel line of cameras. It is a 10.1 megapixel camera. Which is more than sufficient for my needs.

This was taken on a road trip up to Hatcher Pass near Anchorage, Alaska. Our family up in Alaska generously allowed us to visit them and paid our way for us, if they had not we probably would not have been able to go.

I was able to get many photographs of the Alaskan landscape. We went on a couple of road trips and the scenery was very beautiful. Awe-inspiring vistas, rivers, mountains, and we got to see a young Moose by the roadside. Though bears are plentiful we did not have any run ins with them. We did see some salmon that were protecting their eggs after spawning, but did not come during the salmon runs which we were told about as amazing.

The South Central part of Alaska is a wonderful place to visit. We had a great time.