Category: Digital Painting

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Portrait of Russell Brown

For those of you who don’t use Photoshop, you likely have no idea who this is, unless you’re thinking that I got this painting of Abraham Lincoln all wrong.  For those who do travel in the circles of this industry, the man needs no introduction.

Russell Brown is the Senior Creative Director at Adobe, the company that makes Photoshop and a whole host of other creative software that makes the design and publishing world go round.  Not only has Russell been with Adobe for over two decades, but he was greatly involved with the creation of Photoshop 1.0.  He travels the world in his role, attending many different shows and events, and best of all, he always seems to be having a good time.

For the uninitiated, Photoshop can seem to be a daunting and technically challenging exercise, kind of like reading stereo instructions.  For those of us who create, edit, and realize ideas with this software on a daily basis, it’s quite the opposite.  Russell is proof that learning how to use software can be incredibly fun.  Just as sports buffs talk about player stats and get excited about the draft, Photoshop users look forward to new evolutions of the software and wait with great anticipation to see what new features will take our creativity to another level.  Russell Brown is usually one of the guys who shows it to us first, and he does it with style.

From dressing up as the Mad Hatter to a mad scientist (many call him Dr. Brown), Russell recently showed up at Photoshop World in Washington, D.C. dressed as Abraham Lincoln, and apparently stayed in character for much of the event.  While I wasn’t in attendance, he posed for a shoot in the Westcott Lighting booth and a number of photographer friends posted their shots of Steampunk Abe Lincoln.  Russell was obviously approaching this role with great enthusiasm.

I knew right away that I wanted to paint him.

It may come as a surprise to people in this industry that I have never met Russell Brown in person, although we have had email contact over the last couple of years.  As he is always experimenting with new creative techniques, Russell was searching for images to use for a 3D printing process where a laser printer carved part of the image into block of wood, then another pass printed the image on top, giving it a raised relief look.  He chose my Wolf Totem image for this experiment and then sent me a copy of it.  It sits on the mantle in our living room.

We had also talked about using some of my other Totem images for another project, but that one died on the drawing board.  It was still fun, hashing out the details for awhile and sharing my work with him.

Perhaps my favorite story about Russell, however, is about his generosity.  We have a wonderful animal shelter here in Canmore.  Built and run by a very dedicated group of hardworking volunteers, it is a constant effort to find funding and support.  It is a no-kill facility and the animals are very well cared for, with large rooms to live in, indoor and outdoor activity areas, with the goal of finding every one of them a home.  Because of the circles I travel in, a friend asked me if I could help find them some design software for their publicity efforts.  Figuring I had nothing to lose, I sent an email to Russell and asked if he could help.  A very short time later (that same day, if I recall correctly), he asked for the shipping information.  The Bow Valley SPCA received Adobe’s entire Creative Suite less than a week later and they were incredibly grateful.

Now it should be stated, that Russell told me he can’t normally do that sort of thing, so please don’t start sending him a ton of emails asking for free software.

I came very close to meeting him and thanking him in person at Photoshop World in Las Vegas last year, but every time I saw him, he seemed to be on a mission or already talking to somebody and I didn’t want to interrupt him.  He told me later by email that I should have, so this year I definitely will.

As for the painting, I bought the use of the reference photo from a photographer friend of mine, Michelle Hedstrom.  Check out her site at www.ogrephotography.com.   In the interest of showing that my effort is not to copy the photo directly, she has allowed me to post the photo here.  I need reference to get the likeness right, but no photo is ever part of any of my paintings.  These are painted from scratch starting with a blank digital canvas.

This one took about 15 hours, and as it wasn’t a commission and had no commercial application other than a portfolio piece, it was a lot of fun because there was no pressure at all.  It was simply a case of his having a great expressive face, that he was so into the role and that I’ve seen him perform in character, that I wanted to paint him in the first place, as personality is very important to me in my paintings.

For some reason, it just seemed funnier to make him look a little more sinister than stately, so I went with it, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out.  I’m sending the full-resolution file to Russell today, to do with as he likes.  The full size painting is 18″X22″ at 300ppi, so it’s pretty big.  It was painted in Photoshop CS5 on an medium sized Wacom Intuos5 tablet.

Considering that Russell changed his Facebook Profile Pic to this image yesterday and shared the image, I’m taking that as a sign of approval.

If you’d like to see a short timelapse of the painting, complete with overly dramatic musical accompaniment, here’s a video I recorded yesterday as well.

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Penguin Prints at the Calgary Zoo

Just got back from a quick trip to Calgary.  Stopped in at my printer to collect the first prints of the Rockhopper Penguin Totem.  Rather than make two trips, I signed them all at the print shop, put biography inserts  into each of the matted prints, then drove them directly to the Calgary Zoo.  Any other day, I would have brought my camera and taken the opportunity to get some more reference shots for future paintings, but I’m glad I hadn’t planned on that, today.  Quite a few yellow school buses and personal vehicles in the parking lot and very busy once I got in there.  I mean, that place was a zoo! (thank you, tip your waitress, I’m here all week).

While the zoo already has one of my Wolf Totem canvases and a couple of Wolf Totem and Moose Totem matted prints, this is the first large batch of prints they’ve ordered, and in a variety of sizes, too.  With the opening of the Penguin Plunge habitat in Calgary this year, and their retail store located right beside it, this is definitely the best place for that particular painting to be sold.  Here’s hoping it does well, and that pretty soon they’ll be ordering prints of some of my other Totem animals.

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No Strings Attached

The Wacom Intuos5 tablet is a welcome evolution to the line, and while I never felt that the Intuos4 was lacking in any way, it has quickly become apparent that I didn’t know what I was missing.  The new design, heads-up display for the Express Keys and the Touch Ring, along with the improved pen response are reasons enough for me to love this tablet.  The Touch features just ended up being a bonus.

One of the best new features of the Intuos5, however, is the add-on Wireless Accessory Kit.  Even though one or two of the previous tablets had wireless capability, this is the best solution I’ve seen for the feature and it’s impressive how well it works.

The instructions for using the kit couldn’t be simpler, and after charging the battery while I worked, I was anxious to try it out.  My whimsical wildlife paintings hang in galleries in Banff, Canmore, and Calgary, Alberta.  From time to time, I’ll do painting demonstrations, to coincide with a long weekend or the launch of new paintings, both of which happened in May.

The basic setup of the demo is that of me sitting behind a table with the laptop and tablet, and a large secondary display facing outward so that viewers can talk to me, but also see what I’m doing.  With the Wireless Accessory Kit installed, I was able to come out from behind the table, stand beside some of the viewers, and even let them try the tablet right out in front of the secondary display.  It was a very interactive experience for the viewers.

While that would have been enough of a successful test, I recently found myself with another opportunity when I was asked to give presentations to a couple of 7th grade classes at the local school.  This is something I do from time to time, and it usually consists of my running a PowerPoint slideshow presentation from the classroom computer, while the students watch on the peripheral smart-board.   A smart-board is an interactive blackboard sized display screen that many schools are using now.

At the end of the slideshow and talk about editorial cartooning and painting, the students always want me to draw, and I usually end up showing them some rudimentary cartoons on a dry erase board.  While it works well, there’s really no ‘wow’ factor, and I can’t show them how I paint.

For the recent presentation, I hooked up my laptop directly to the smart-board, connected the Intuos5 tablet and was able to wirelessly control the slideshow from anywhere in the room.  The range of the Wireless Accessory Kit far exceeded my expectations.  With the laptop in one corner, I could stand by the door at the opposite corner of the room and there was no performance loss whatsoever.  It was easily 25-30 feet between connections, and I could paint as if I was sitting directly in front of the laptop.

While I was well aware that I would be able to control Photoshop with the tablet, I knew that controlling PowerPoint with it was going to free me up even more.   In the Wacom Settings, I customized the Functions specifically for PowerPoint.  I programmed four of the Express Keys for the operations I would need.   In order from the top, I chose Next Slide, Previous Slide, Start Slideshow, and End Show.  While you can see a screen shot of the ‘Express View’ here, I disabled it during the show, so that it wouldn’t pop up over my slides, and I could just keep my finger on the ‘Next Slide’ button.  Under the Touch Options, I had the touch features disabled for the length of the presentation.

I use the Keynote app on my iPad for a duplicate of the slideshow with my presentation notes, and I saw no reason why I couldn’t be free of my laptop for the entire session.  Since I only needed the Express Keys for the slideshow, I put my iPad on the tablet and carried it around (with both hands, of course) activating the slide buttons with my left thumb.So I had my notes, my slideshow, a controller for the presentation and freedom to move around the room.  It is true that the iPad has apps that can control presentations like this wirelessly, but in my experience, they’re pretty twitchy, especially when connecting to unfamiliar WiFi.

As I was using the tablet for multiple applications during the presentation already, this was a great plug-and-play solution, with no problems.  When the slideshow was finished, I removed the iPad, sat down at a desk in the center of the room in front of the Smart-board, launched Photoshop and proceeded to show the students a little on how I draw and paint digitally.

The two presentations took about three hours of my time, and with the Intuos5 tablet and wireless control of the smart board, I never once needed to go back to my laptop.  The integration was flawless, and this is how I’ll do presentations and demos from now on.

If you’d like to know more about how I setup the Express Keys, Touch Ring and Radial Menu for Photoshop, check out these videos.

 Wacom Intuos5 – Express Keys and Touch Ring

 

 Wacom Intuos5 – The Radial Menu

 

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Rockhopper Penguin Totem

This ornery looking fellow is a Rockhopper Penguin, the latest Totem in the series and one of my more challenging paintings to date.  While I usually have a lot of fun with these, this one was a roller coaster of frustration.

The main reason I added this animal to the series at this point is because the Calgary Zoo had expressed interest.  With their recent addition of The Penguin Plunge habitat to their facility, penguins are a pretty big deal in Calgary this year.  While they have already taken a chance on my Wolf and Moose paintings, I’d like to have more of my Totems for sale at the zoo, so the decision to  paint a penguin right now was a commercial one.  I sent the finished image to my contact at the zoo this morning within a short time of finishing it, and it was well received.  They’ve already ordered a significant number of prints in a variety of sizes, so they should be available at their retail outlet soon.  Right outside The Penguin Plunge.

So why was this so frustrating?  Honestly, with the exception of the Ostrich Totem, I find birds incredibly difficult to paint.  Perhaps it’s because their body structure is so different from mammals, a beak instead of a mouth, usually only one eye visible instead of two, also that they’re very stiff looking…honestly I don’t know what it is.  It wasn’t the detail, because the feathers were a lot of work, but not difficult to paint, just time consuming.  When I’m working on a painting, I start at low-resolution, then as more and more detail gets painted in, I’ll bump up the resolution until it’s around 18″X24″ at 300ppi.  When it gets to this point, the painting is really close to being finished, it’s just a matter of painting in a lot of tiny details.  With this penguin, however, I was trying to fix structural issues at full size, something I would rarely do.  But I’d painted so much detail in a lot of places that didn’t need to be fixed, so I couldn’t go backwards without losing that.

My wife Shonna is not an artist, but she has this uncanny knack of looking at a painting I’m working on and instantly seeing what’s wrong with it.  It’s very annoying, but also very helpful.  When I ask her opinion, I brace myself for what I know is coming, because there is always something.   With this penguin, she saw more than a few problems.  The eye wasn’t in the right place, the yellow feathers didn’t look right, the beak was shaped wrong.  It was brutal.

All of these issues were addressed and repainted, adding at least another five or six hours to a piece I’d already been working on for many more than that.  The personality didn’t even seem to show up until the last few hours, which is very unusual.  So while there’s nothing more I could do to this painting to improve it, I had a hard time ‘feeling’ it while I was doing the work.  There were still times when I was really enjoying myself, but not as much as I normally do.  The Bighorn Sheep Totem was like this as well, and while I love that painting now, I didn’t immediately after I’d finished it.

So what did I learn?  Well, sometimes you just have to plow through and git ‘er done, even when you’re not feeling it.  The finished painting may feel a little different to me at the moment, but anyone buying it doesn’t know the frustrating back story (unless they read it here), so it now stands on its own merit.  It’ll either be popular or it won’t, and time will tell.  Also, I took most of the reference photos myself, and they were average.  For the pose and general features, however, they were good enough.  For the fine details,  I decided to go and buy some stock photos.  After reading their licensing agreement that permits this usage for work like mine, I’ll be doing that more often.  Some great closeup detail reference on stock photo sites, and reasonably priced, too.  This is going to make future paintings a little easier for me.

While I’ve been working on commissions the last little while, turns out this is the first Totem I’ve added to the series since the Cougar in January.  I’ve got a couple of other painting projects up next, but I’m hoping to have another Totem done before the end of the summer.  And no, it’s not a bird.

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How much is that doggie in the painting?

Every time I post a new commission piece, as I did last week, people ask me what I charge for custom work.  For some reason, there used to be this grey area among artists about whether or not to post your prices.  I’ve read some compelling opinions on both sides of the argument, but one thing I’ve learned lately is that eventually you have to pick a side and stick to it.  That, and everybody has an opinion.

When it comes to editorial cartoons, illustration work and commercial painting gigs, each one is negotiated individually, because every client, usage, and situation is different.  Commissions for the animal paintings, however, are pretty straightforward, as long as the client is looking for the same style of image that can be seen in my portfolio.  An animal portrait painting, whimsical Totem style or not, is a lot of work, but it’s straightforward and there are usually no surprises.   In the interest of pulling back the curtain, I thought I’d just post the standard commission information.  This will also enable me to link to this post in the future whenever the inquiries come in.  There are always little differences in each inquiry, but consider this the foundation on which all of my painting commissions are built.  These are the current prices and details.  While they’re unlikely to change in the very near future, prices will go up over time, and with demand.

Whether it’s the Totem or realistic style, the price is the same.  For 1 (one) animal, commissions start at $600.00 (CDN), which includes a 16″X20″ signed matted print, with free shipping anywhere in Canada or the Continental U.S.  There are additional costs for other printing options as there is a significant difference between an 8″X10″ paper print and an 18″X24″ framed canvas print, both in production and shipping fees.  The time to complete a commission will vary, depending on my workload, but usually it’s around 4-6 weeks from the time I receive the reference photos.  If you live in Canada, there is GST or HST added to that price, depending on the region.  You can blame the government for that.  I require a 50 percent non-refundable deposit on all commissions once an agreement has been reached, the remainder due upon completion.

One request I’m getting more and more of these days is for the full-resolution digital file.  While I used to be on the fence about this, as many artists and photographers are when it comes to their images,  I now give the digital file to every client.  I still retain the copyright, but these days, clients want to be able to post something like this on a website and social media and maybe print a few extra copies for themselves. As long as they aren’t trying to pass it off as their own work, or sell copies of the images, I feel that’s fair.  They paid for the work, just as if a company might have paid me for an ad illustration.  That way, if they want to put the painting of Fido on their Christmas card that year, they’re free to do so.

While no photos are ever part of the paintings, I can’t very well paint those little freckles you love so much on your cat’s nose if I don’t know what they look like, so I need good photos to work from  Some of my clients have been photographers.  As a result, many of the reference photos I’ve had to work with have been great.  Since not everybody can be a photographer, it’s often a challenge to find the right photos.  The better the photos I have, the better the painting will be.  In a perfect world, the photos should be sharp, good lighting, fairly close up of the face of the animal, a straight on or 3/4 pose, at eye level, and looking at the camera.  The more photos to choose from, the better.  Problems that occur with some animal photos is that their eyes are highly reflective, and a flash can completely wash out the detail.  If your dog or cat looks sad in all of the photos provided, it can be tough to make him or her look happy, without the risk of losing the likeness.

Let’s use fictitious Fido as an example.  Fido is a shaggy dog that is dirty and in desperate need of a haircut.  Can’t see his eyes, he’s looking elsewhere, it’s dusk, the photo was taken from far away, and the only copy available  is a 4″X6″ low resolution image on Facebook.  The client’s instructions are, “his hair is usually a lot shorter than that, he has big brown eyes.  When we go to our cottage in the woods, he always likes to put his paws up on the window and look out, so I’d like to see him like that.”

Based on this, I’m going to ask for more photos and negotiate that pose.  If this were all I had to go on, I would decline the opportunity, because the client wouldn’t be happy with the finished work, anyway.  Having done a number of these commissions of people and animals over the years, I can usually tell quite quickly if it’s going to work out or not.

Suppose, however, that the client has given me fantastic photos of Fido to work from, great lighting, sharp detail and is flexible on the pose, but then adds, “I’d like him to be wearing his collar with his name tag on it.  He also likes to sit with his favorite fifteen stuffed animals and toys.”

The collar would be no problem and would not affect the cost.  The same would apply to maybe sticking a bow-tie on Fido, or even a comical pair of glasses if that’s what the client wanted.  Some of that I can make up, and  I would consider that part of the foundation.  All of those toys, however, very specific toys, well, that’s going to definitely be an added cost, as would any other additional specific details that the client would like to include.  Any additional animals would also affect the cost.  While a few have asked, I decline the opportunity to paint a person and an animal in the same portrait.  My styles for both are very different, and they just don’t go together.

Painting these animals is a joy most of the time and I find that I like hearing the ‘back story’, too.  We sure do love our animals, and hearing folks talk about the personality of their furry, hairy, or feathered friend is something I enjoy very much.  I’ve no doubt that it helps me paint a better likeness and hopefully capture some of that personality in the painting.  One of my favorites was Chase, the happy German Shepherd with his titanium tooth.

Chase

I’ve been hired to paint a couple of memorial portraits of furry loved ones, too,  and the importance of that isn’t lost on me.  Titus the cat, who lived to the very ripe old age of 24, sitting in the scrap paper bin he apparently enjoyed so much at their printing business.  I’m told the painting now hangs above the bin.  Then there’s Gilly the Pomeranian who passed away last year.  The client told me his wife cried when they got the painting home, but they were tears for happy memories.  I guess I like the stories after the paintings are done, too.

I enjoy these commissions, and will continue to do them as long as folks keep asking me to.  If you’ve been thinking about a commission, or just have any questions that weren’t addressed here, please do drop me a line, either on Facebook or by email, and I’ll be happy to answer.

 

 

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Mocha

MochaFinished working with this little lady yesterday morning, a commissioned painting for a happy client.  When this commission came about, I was a little apprehensive as I had never painted a horse before.  Not that I’d ever painted a Moose, Grizzly, Raven…(you get the idea)…before I’d done those, either, but horses just seem to have their own challenges.  Such beautiful animals, I was most worried that I wouldn’t be able to realize what I saw in my head.

The photos I had to choose from were great, as the client is a talented photographer.  Won’t say her name quite yet as this was commissioned for a gift, and while I have permission to post it, I don’t want to leave easily searchable clues.  I’ll link to her work in another post later.  I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of talented photographers on commission work and I never get tired of it.  Nothing like working with clean crisp detailed photo reference.

One of the big challenges with this painting was the horse’s mane, especially the section that falls down between the ears.  I had to create a whole new brush just for that, something I really enjoy doing.  It’s almost like artistic engineering, creating new brushes to get a specific look.  A lot of trial and error.  I had to modify an existing brush to get the short little hairs on her face to look the way I wanted them to as well.

I know I say this on every piece, but I really had a lot of fun with this painting.  Her personality showed up early and I found myself smiling a lot while working on it.  Couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.

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Prints and Painting Demos

This is the half page ad that will appear in this week’s Rocky Mountain Outlook, for the launch of the four new Totem paintings.

On Friday, I picked up a very large print order in Calgary, a mix of matted paper prints and canvas prints.  While the majority of these were the four newly released Totem paintings, there were also a number of replacement prints for ones that have sold, and prints for online orders that I’ll be packing and shipping today.

For the matted prints, they come assembled and in a plastic sleeve.  All I have to do is insert a bio sheet into each one, sign it and seal the packaging.  For one or two, it doesn’t take much time.  For ninety-five, however, it took a couple of hours, and thankfully, no issues with the paint pen.  Paint pens are finicky.  I’ve tried a number of them and just when you think everything is going well, they can spontaneously spurt a couple of drops of paint on a print, essentially ruining it.  On a matted print, it’s a disappointment.  On a canvas print, you end up holding back tears.  I test the pen on a scrap piece of paper before I sign each print and make sure there is no excess paint built up around the nib.  You only have to lose one canvas (and I have) to never make that mistake again.  And even with the utmost care, it can still happen.

I’ll be signing the limited edition canvas prints today.  In addition to that, I have to print up numbered certificates of authenticity for each one, and enter each on a ledger.  When you’re offering limited edition prints, it’s very important not to double up the numbers.  People are expecting that the number they buy is the only one with that designation, and it’s up to the artist to ensure that nobody ever buys the same print number.

The new prints look incredible, and I’m very pleased.  All of the proofing that I did last month with my printer was well worth it.  While I know that I can always improve on my work, I love these paintings.  It’s been over two years since I painted the first one, the Grizzly Totem, and it’s still one of my favorites, and not just because it’s one of my best sellers.

With a number of critters waiting in the wings, there will be more paintings coming this year, all of which I’m excited to get started on.  The current Totem-in-progress, a Rockhopper Penguin, is well past the halfway point, and I’ll be working on that this Saturday at Two Wolves.

Painting demos are kind of fun.  Not only do I get to educate people about digital painting (“no, I am not manipulating photos”), but I enjoy the company of the people who work at Two Wolves, and just talking to the customers and answering their questions while I paint.

I don’t get out much.  It’s a nice change.

 

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Of Paint and Penguins

Seems strange that I was excited to have a day to do nothing but paint this morning and then woke to find little motivation to do so.  Just wasn’t feeling it.  While it’s true that drawing and coloring for a living (I love saying that) sounds like the greatest gig going, and it really is, there are some days that it just feels like work.  Editorial cartooning often feels like that, especially when I’m cartooning about a political topic that I really care nothing about, but if it’s making headlines, I have to address it.  Painting, however, is usually the dessert after eating all of my veggies, so it’s rare for it not to be a welcome experience.  This morning, it felt like work, but just as I have to do with cartooning, I plowed through and managed a couple of hours, anyway.

I was inspired to put on the headset and record ten minutes of painting and talking about whatever popped into my head while doing it, though.  None of it was scripted or prepared ahead of time, although I did throw up a quick DVD ad at the end of it.  Hey, we all have to make a living, right?  Obviously, I haven’t shown the full painting here, just a closeup of the head.  At one point, I mistakenly said, ‘radial wheel’ when describing the touch ring on the Wacom tablet.  Like I said, not scripted.

Anyway, hope you get something useful out of it.  Cheers!

 

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A portrait of Jim

My buddy Jim and I have been good friends for over 15 years, and last night was his 50th birthday, so another good friend of his and I threw him a party.  Not a huge affair, about 25-30 people, I think,  but a good time sharing laughs with friends.  Whenever I go camping at a lake in B.C.  or to my buddy’s cabin, it’s usually Jim that I’m going with.  He loves taking snapshots of his friends and road trips, and has collected many memories on film over the years.  As he recently bought a new computer, a digital camera wasn’t going to be far off, so my wife and I, along with two other couples went in on a very nice camera, a Canon Powershot SX40, a higher end but user friendly camera, great for high quality point and shoot photos with a fantastic 35X built-in zoom lens.  Came very close to getting him a DSLR, but this was a better choice for someone who just wants to capture memories of people and places, without requiring a ton of photography knowledge.  Along with some other accessories we bought him, he was very pleased with the gift and I’m sure he’ll get a lot of use out of it.

One of the great things about my profession is that on rare occasions, I can create a gift that is unique to me.   While he would have been pleased with the camera alone, I decided that I wanted to paint a portrait for Jim’s 50th as well.  Fortunately, those times you can count on me having a decent camera with me is when I’m out camping or at the cabin, so it turns out that I’ve taken quite a few photos of Jim over the years, and had many to go through.  Only a couple were good candidates for reference photos, however, and I count myself lucky that the one I ended up using was only two years old.

Painting a portrait like this has a few challenges.  Over the years, Jim has had a mustache, a goatee, a full beard and will often alternate between them.  So even though he doesn’t have a full beard right now, he did in the reference photo and he will again in the future, I’m sure.  He’s got a little more grey now than he did a couple of years ago, but I only added in as much as I had to.  After all, he was supposed to like the painting.  While the little details are important, creative license is as well.  My intent was to capture his likeness, but more importantly, his personality, and I think I did that.  As is my nature, I obsessed over the details on this one, as I’ll have to see it for years to come, but I was very pleased with the finished work, and it looks great on canvas.

As much as I’d love to be able to paint portraits for a few other people, the reality is that Jim is probably the only one for whom I could have done this, as most of the time, I’m not snapping photos of people on a day to day basis, and certainly not with anything better than my phone.  If I suddenly started taking head-shots of my friends with my DSLR, it would be pretty obvious to any of them why I was doing it.  This is also the reason I had to rely on photos I already had, so as not to give it away.  This was a unique gift that I was happy to give, and one I’ll unlikely be able to do for anyone else, at least not anytime in the near future.

The background for the portrait is Cleland Lake in B.C., a forestry lake that we’ve been going to for many years, Jim for over two decades.  That particular view is from his favorite spot on the lake.  The painting was printed at 12″X16″ on canvas and framed, and he really seemed to like it.

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A nice mention in Photoshop User

It was pointed out to me yesterday that I received a mention in the April issue of Photoshop User magazine regarding my article on brushes in last month’s issue.  Pete Collins, one of the NAPP Photoshop Guys and an all around great guy (don’t tell him I said that) was kind enough to give a tip of the hat to my tutorial in his current feature, “What Would MacGyver Do?”  (April issue, Page 46)   Pete’s article is a very interesting read that talks about different resources and solutions available to designers in Photoshop when faced with a tight deadline and a limited budget.