So following my 4th painting, I stopped painting for more than 2 years. The desire to start painting came over me recently and I decided to look into using my iPad and a stylus to start sketching and explore the world of digital art. After fiddling with a couple of programs I came across Procreate. It is a brilliant app with PhotoShop-like capabilities.
Using ProCreate, I started to work on my first digital paintings. The first successful one is presented here as “The Flame”. It is effectively a study into the use of colour to bring a vivid flame to life. I think I was quite successful in accomplishing what I set out to do, but the colour faded when I converted it from ProCreate to png format. The reflection off the candle is not quite there, but the flame looks like its really burning.
The second rather successful digital painting was “The Lake”, which is presented below. The lines on the hills on the right is to dark and I should have changed that, but apart from that I think I achieved the “close to photorealism” that I set out to achieve.
There are two key aspects present in digital art that makes it a very attractive option over traditional painting. These are the ability to use layers and the undo tool. Both of these are empowering tools and give you the freedom to experiment and you want to without ruining your painting.
One other tools that I recently started to use was Pinterest. My wife and kids pin for the sake of pinning, but I have found a place where I can get new ideas for painting. My boards are collections of photos for paintings that I can visit at any given time to directly paint from or to use to compose a new painting.
Francois' Art Blog 