Sunday, December 21, 2008

My First Digital Painting

I've never been much of a painter, so I've always shied away from trying to paint in Photoshop. Last week, though, I watched Joe Bluhm's latest digital painting podcast, and he talked a bit about about being fearless in your painting, which inspired me to give it a shot.

I wasn't going for a good likeness here, I just wanted to try playing with Photoshop, and to ease me into it, I went monochromatic.

And because I save lots of versions as I work, I can even show some in process versions.




One problem I've noticed with my Cintiq is that the image is usually way too dark. What appears to be a deep black on a Cintiq is barely darker than a middle grey on my other monitor. My solution was to do the painting on the Cintiq, check the values on my other monitor, darken the image using the Curves editor, and then go back in and paint more. Anyone have a better solution?

2 comments:

Renee Kurilla said...

Ok, one...I'm jealous of your Cintiq.
Two..I think this looks great! It looks very similar to oil paint.

There is this program that I've been using that Bob Flynn found...it's called ArtRage. You should try it out..it's free to try and cheap if you want to buy the whole version.
http://www.ambientdesign.com/

The difference between this program and Photoshop is that it actually feels like you're pushing paint around and can watch it happening on screen. It's amazing.

Adam Sacks said...

Thanks Renee, I'll have to check it out.