Category: Digital Painting

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Humpback Whale Totem

Humpback Whale Totem

The latest painting in my Totem series, and while Humpback Whales are found all over the world, I consider this the first image in my Pacific Coast series.

This painting was an incredible challenge, and while I had always intended the Humpback to be part of my Totem series, it was something I wanted to do to prove a little something to myself as well.  Comments on the other animal paintings often mention how much people like the way I paint fur.  While that’s appreciated, I wanted to paint an animal that had none at all, just to see if I could do it.

There were a number of challenges with this painting.  First, it’s underwater, so there were choices to make on that.  When dealing with cool colors on cool colors, the effort to make the whale stand out from the background was going to be in the light contrast and taking a lot of creative license in the color of the whale itself.  Another challenge was the texture.  For a few hours while painting this, she looked a little like stucco because I had far too much contrast in the details, so rather than a rubbery looking skin, it looked almost scaly.  While correcting that, I went a little too far and the skin look too airbrushed.  What you see here is the compromise.  Skin that is still textured and non-uniform, but still trying to achieve a smoother look than I’m used to. And finally, I wrestled with the water.  I didn’t want a smooth gradient look, but I also didn’t want to go with the cliché ‘god lights’ that so many artists use in underwater scenes, those rays of light beaming in from the surface to give the painting an ethereal look.  Just didn’t feel right.  The background in my paintings is supposed to be just that, so I broke it up with the suggestion of particulates and bubbles.

Initially, I had planned on the finished image being 30″x40″ at 300 ppi.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get there.  The full resolution file for this painting is 18″x24″ at 300 ppi, because at one point, the working file size was right around 800MB.  My computer’s good, but it gets sluggish when painting detail at that size.  I’ve no doubt that I could still print this file at 30″x40″ at 200ppi on canvas and it would still look good, though.

Had a bunch of highs and lows while painting this little lady (BIG lady) and I can’t even guess how many hours I put into it, but it was a lot, likely more than I’ve put into any other painting.  For a few hours on the weekend, I was very frustrated and was worried I wasn’t going to achieve the look I wanted.  When that was going on, I wasn’t having any fun, whatsoever.

As difficult as this painting was, I learned a lot.  Had to create a few new brushes, something I haven’t done in awhile, but they’re now in my library and will come in handy the next time I paint an animal with mottled textured skin.  I also learned a few new layering techniques to get the suggestion of detail, without making it too sharp.

While it took a lot out of me, I’m pleased with the finished painting, and I think I’ve grown a little more as an artist, which is always the intent.

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Painting a Gentle Giant

Humpback whale and calf in The Broken Group Islands – Patrick LaMontagne

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been enamored with humpback whales, and I have no idea why this particular species of baleen whale holds my love and interest over any other marine mammal.  My wife and I saw these two (and a few more) on a tour of the Broken Group Islands out of Ucluelet on Vancouver Island this past summer, and although we only saw backs and tails, it was a thrilling experience.

A longtime dream I’ve had is to be in the water with one of these massive creatures.  Now before you think me a little nuts, I’m not oblivious to the danger.  I know that an animal can be as gentle as a kitten, but when it’s the size of a semi truck, you don’t want to be under it when it rolls over.  Despite that, the desire is very strong and I intend to make it happen.  I want to get my diving certification in the next year or two, and to swim with humpbacks in the next five.  It’s an expensive trip, but it’s one worth saving for.

From time to time over the years, I’ve had very vivid dreams featuring different animals.  One in particular, was the spark for my Animal Totem series.  Humpbacks have shown up a few times, most recently last week and it prompted me to start searching for reference.  When I found the right image (and there was no doubt, once I saw it), I started looking for the photographer who took it.

As I’ve mentioned before about photo reference, no photos are ever part of my paintings, but I still need to have great shots to work from in order to get the level of detail that I paint.  I can’t tell you from memory what the hair on a moose looks like as it transitions over the nose, or how a bighorn sheep’s horns curl around in relation to his other features.  So, I rely on the work of wildlife photographers to provide me with the reference I need.

Some photographer friends, of which I thankfully have many, have been very generous in allowing me the use of their work.  For others, I have traded my services as an illustrator for their own projects, or paid them outright for the license to use certain photos.   A few have asked for canvas prints of the finished painting in payment.  I’ve been agreeable to all of these terms, and grateful for their willingness to help me do what I love to do.

From time to time, a wildlife photographer will tell me they aren’t interested or their price will be too high for my budget.  In those cases, I’m usually disappointed, but I thank them for their time and look for other reference.  Even though my finished paintings look very little like the photos I use for reference, so many photographers have had their work stolen online and they’re extra cautious about allowing their work to be used.  It’s unfortunate, but a reality of the business, and as these photos are the product of their time and effort, they have every right to say No,  just as I’ve declined certain uses of my own work.  So I try to be hopeful but not too optimistic when I approach a photographer with whom I have no connection.

When I found the right humpback image, I was pleased.  All that was left was to get permission and the high resolution photo, and that’s how I found Scott Portelli.  Scott is a wildlife photographer out of Sydney,  Australia, and he specializes in taking photos of Humpback Whales.  Each year, for the past decade, he has taken small groups of people to Tonga to swim with these gentle giants.  From August to October, Humpbacks mate and give birth in these warm waters.  Scott is an active supporter of whale conservation and vocal opponent of the practice of whaling that sadly, still goes on today.

Having made ‘the ask,’  I set about to work on other things, as you never know how long the response will take.  Scott replied quickly, was very kind and we soon came to an agreement for the use of the photo.  Yesterday, I received the high-res image and I am very happy.  It’s a beautiful reference to work from, and I now have no doubt that I’ll be able to paint the image I’ve been imagining.  There are a few animals I’ve been waiting to paint until I had just the right reference, and this is one of them.  Thanks, Scott.

While I won’t post the image I’m using, please do look at Scott’s wonderful photos of these and other beautiful animals.  You can find his website and links to his Flickr account at www.scottportelli.com.

What I find especially thrilling is that this search led me not only to the photo, but to the means to fulfill my dream.  When I am ready to swim with Humpback Whales, I will know who to contact.  If you’d like to find out more about Scott’s excursions and tours to the beautiful waters around Tonga, you can find that information at www.swimmingwithgentlegiants.com

Somebody recently made a comment online that my specialty was obviously painting fur.  While it’s great to have that skill recognized, as it took me a long time to develop the techniques, I have no desire to be a one-trick-pony and only be able to paint furry animals, despite how much I enjoy it.  This whale will be a personal challenge as there’s not one hair to be painted in the whole image, but I think I’m up to it.  And I’m excited to get started.

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Portrait of Rocky Balboa

This painting, like many that I do these days, was an absolute pleasure to work on.  For the past couple of years, I’ve been focused on my Animal Totems, and although they are still where I plan to continue investing my creative energy, I realized that I hadn’t done a full painting of a person in quite awhile.  Yes, I’ve done a few on the iPad, but not a fully finished painting.  I think the last one I did was a caricature of Bert Monroy, and that was in June of 2010.  I figured it was time to do another one, and rather than a caricature, I wanted to paint a portrait.

Regular readers will know how much I love movies.  One of my favorites is Rocky Balboa, the sixth movie in the series.  I think the reason I like it is because it’s not so much about Rocky’s battle with an opponent, it’s his struggle with getting older, but still feeling he has left something undone.  Some critics panned it for being overly romanticized and unrealistic, but I disagree.  Very much like the tone and writing of the first Rocky movie, the movie that won and was nominated for a slew of Oscars in 1976.   Rocky Balboa inspired me, much like Sylvester Stallone’s own personal story does.  If you aren’t familiar with it, you might want to take the time to listen to how Tony Robbins tells it.

Rather than paint him as the fighter in the ring, I wanted to paint the real character.   His wife has passed on, his son is now a young man living on his own, and Rocky spends his evenings at his restaurant telling people old ‘war stories’ from his glory days.  But there’s still that hunger.  The movie reminds me that one of my own biggest fears is becoming an old man and regretting the things left undone.

This was started as a painting on the iPad, shown here.  I used the procreate app, the Wacom Bamboo Stylus, and the Nomad mini brush.  As much as I enjoy painting on the iPad, and a number of my recent portrait paintings have stopped there, I brought this one into Photoshop and painted over it to get the look and texture I wanted.  While my animal paintings are very detailed, this one is intentionally rougher.  The tone of the piece, and the age of the subject called for a little less polish.  The finished painting was done in Photoshop with a Wacom Intuos4 medium tablet, and the image size is 16″X20″ at 300ppi.

Even though I’ve never had any of my own work printed for myself, I think I will get this one printed on canvas and framed for my office.  Never hurts to be reminded that our time here is short.

Incidentally, one of my favorite onscreen speeches is from this movie, this one from Rocky to his son.

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Rocky Balboa – iPad Painting

This is my latest iPad painting, Sylvester Stallone as Rocky in the sixth and final movie of the series, Rocky Balboa.  Some critics scorned it as having too many clichés and being unbelievable, but it’s my favorite of the series.

This is as far as I could take the painting on the iPad, and I’ll be using this as a rough for a finished painting in Photoshop.  The finished painting will not be in black and white, but I find accurate colour to be incredibly difficult and a useless effort on the iPad, so I’ll do that in Photoshop.

I painted this with the procreate app, still the one I prefer to work with most.  Most of the work here was done using the Wacom Bamboo Stylus, but I also used the Nomad Mini brush for some of the nitpicky texture work.

This is by no means finished, and I can already see many things  I want to change and improve on, both in the painted details and the likeness.  But it’s a good start.  With each iPad painting I do, I’m getting more comfortable with it, and figuring out just what’s possible.  Still enjoying working with the device, tools, and apps and I plan to continue improving my skills.

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Time and Tide

Over the past four or five years, I’ve spent a great deal of time learning all I can, working to improve my skills, attending conferences, webinars, and even taking a couple of online courses.  This year, I’ve realized that there isn’t as much out there for me when it comes to education.  Yes, there will always be better artists to learn from, but many of them aren’t lecturing at conferences or teaching courses specific enough to warrant the expense.

I wrote recently that I wouldn’t be attending Photoshop World again next year,  so I considered attending the ICON illustration conference.  I’ve read good reviews, but it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do at the moment.  Earlier this year, I had decided not to attend the Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists conference next summer in Montreal, because even though there are people I would like to see, it really isn’t a conference about learning.  I can’t justify the expense for three or four days just to hang out and talk shop.  I realize Montreal is a beautiful city, but my wife and I have other vacation plans for 2012.

One decision I’ve now made for the next year is that unless I’m working or speaking at one, I’m not going to be attending any conferences.

With the success of my animal paintings and the fact that I enjoy them so much, it is very clear that I’ve finally found my niche.  This is the work I’m supposed to be doing and it’s a great feeling to have absolutely no doubt about that.  While I still enjoy drawing cartoons and painting people, painting animals is where I find the most fulfillment.

It is gratifying that my work has a growing following.  The paintings are doing well in both Two Wolves in Canmore and the About Canada Gallery in Banff, I’ve signed my first licensing deal with Island Art Publishers, and I’m beginning to get commissions that are a lot of fun to work on.  While I’m fortunate to enjoy most of the work I’ve been doing the past decade, I’ve never enjoyed it more than when I’m painting.

With a couple of DVDs under my belt, my second webinar for Wacom in a few weeks and some knocks on the door from other companies, it has become clear that I’ve stepped well into the realm of teaching, which is often a logical step for many students to take.  While I still intend to keep learning as much as I can, I’ve found that I’m finally comfortable passing on some of the skills I’ve learned, and I’m enjoying it, too.

But, where to go from here?  It’s a question faced by every freelancer, entrepreneur, and self-employed person and one you end up asking yourself over and over at different stages in any career.  Sure, there are many people who have done it before, some of them poorly and others with monumental success, and while their advice and example can aid in the big decisions, the choices still rest with each individual, and with how much each person is willing to risk.

For most of this past year, I was so focused on the DVDs for PhotoshopCAFE and other commission work, that I added only one painting to my Totem series, which was the Great Horned Owl.  Only one.  When I realized that this summer, I don’t mind saying that I wasn’t pleased.  The one thing I love to do more than anything in my work, and it turned out that I made it the lowest priority.  Obviously, I dropped the ball on that.

For the next year, my main focus will be these paintings.  Not just working on them, but promoting and selling them.  I’ve still got other commission work that I’ll be doing, and another DVD in the works for PhotoshopCAFE, but the main priority will be the work I love to do most.

There can often be a number of ‘right’ choices, and because of this, many people will succumb to the paralysis of making no choice at all.  This is the surest way to stall any progress in a freelance career.  Moving forward has always required taking risks, and part of that risk is making bold decisions without knowing how they’ll turn out.  So rather than play a game of wait and see, I’m going to gamble on success.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to get a Small Press booth at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo at the end of April.  Between now and then, I’ll be preparing promotional material, designing and purchasing a large banner and hardware for the booth, figuring out which varieties of prints to sell, and doing as much research as possible to make sure I put my best foot forward.  This will involve a significant expense, but as the old cliché goes, ‘you have to spend money to make money.’

30,000 people went through the doors last year, so I figure it will be a good place to get my trade show feet wet. I’ll be painting live at the booth all weekend, in addition to selling prints and my DVDs.  I have to figure out how many of each I’ll need.  I could bring way too much and go home with a lot of inventory or fail to bring enough and sell out on Day 2.  It’s a gamble because I don’t know how popular my work will be with the attendees, but there’s only one way to find out.

Either way,  I know that I’m going to learn a lot from the experience, and I won’t be standing still.

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Painting, Projects, and Promotion

As I’m not a fan of the holiday season, I’ll tend to keep to myself over the next couple of months.  With that in mind, I plan to keep busy with paintings and other projects and I’ve made sure that I’ve got plenty on the go, including a number of paintings.

One project I’ve planned is creating a short promotional video of my painted work.  Not sure how I’ll use it, but I still think it’ll be a fun challenge.  Basically, it’ll be a video commercial for one of my animal paintings, which translates to all of my paintings.

I recently acquired the license for four reference images for wildlife paintings and while I’m looking forward to working on all of them, there is one in particular that has me excited.  The image is very clear in my mind, and the photo I have to work from is incredible in its detail.  With that in mind, I’m going to create a 2.5 minute video of the whole painting process, from start to finish.  Most of the painting will be sped up quite a bit, but there will be sections from the entire process included in the video, sketches to finished work.

This video you see here is a test, using the bighorn sheep painting that I’m currently working on.  You have to look closely to see some of the brushwork that I’m doing in the video, something I’ll do better in the future piece.  This is about 20 minutes of painting, sped up to be around 2 minutes in the video.  I bought the royalty-free piece of music yesterday, and while the license cost more than three CDs, you have to pay for quality and it’s not like I’ll be doing this on a regular basis.

I’m a big fan of movie-making and movies in general, and there’s a lot added by an appropriate piece of music.  This one is fine for the bighorn sheep painting, but it’s a perfect fit for the actual painting and animal I’m planning to use it for.  In this video, you don’t get to see the whole painting, and that’s intentional, because it’ll be done this week and I don’t want to show it too early.  The real detail has yet to be painted.

This was a learning process, but not as difficult as I thought it would be.  Some of the things I’ve got planned for the next one will be complicated with the software I have, but figuring that out will be part of the fun.

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Ostrich – iPad Painting

Here’s another painting I did on the iPad over a period of three or four days.  This is the kind of thing I like to do while sitting watching TV, as it’s not on deadline and is just fun to work on.

This was painted using the Procreate app, the Wacom Bamboo Stylus and the Nomad mini brush, which arrived last week.  While I’m very happy with the Wacom, I’ve been seeing ads and reviews for the Nomad brush around the net and I thought I’d give it a try.  Because I like having everything portable, I bought the mini brush instead of the longer ones and I really enjoyed working with it.  It doesn’t really do anything I can’t do with the Wacom stylus, but when it came to working on the little hairs and some subtle shading, it was more enjoyable to work with as it glides over the screen a lot easier than a traditional stylus.

I wouldn’t want to be limited to only the Nomad brush, however.  While it’s great for painting, I don’t like it for drawing, but then, it’s not really designed for that anyway.  After finishing this painting using the Wacom and the Nomad, I’m going to continue to use them both.  They each have their strengths and I enjoyed using them both on this painting.  The only downside of the brush is that you want to be careful not to squash or wreck the bristles by leaving it lying around.  I was thinking that a little cap would have been a good thing to include with this brush/stylus.  But then again, I’d probably lose the cap, so it’s probably fine the way it is.

When I’m using the iPad, I have the brightness set to 50 percent.  Because I spend so much time in front of the computer, the brightness of my desktop monitor is set pretty low as well.  I plan to preserve my eyesight as long as possible, so I try to minimize my exposure to bright light.  The downside of working on the iPad is that it means making adjustments for that before posting.  There are a few apps out there that will make color and brightness adjustments but I’m still getting used to how far I have to push things to get them to look right online.  It’s an ongoing process, but I’m learning.

This close-up is actual pixels, 72 ppi, so you can see that this is one of the limitations of working on the iPad.  I have the first generation iPad, and I know the 2nd generation has better resolution, so you’ll be able to get a little more detail, but not a lot more.

So, in the interest of full disclosure, I did bring this into Photoshop for some color adjustment.  Every monitor is going to be different, but mine is calibrated and the color I saw on the iPad is not what it looked like when I emailed it to myself in order to post it.  So while all of the brush work was done on the iPad, I did do a Hue/Saturation and Levels adjustment on my desktop.  I also used a bit of Smart Sharpen.  Here, you can see the difference side by side.  While the one on the left is what I got from the iPad in my inbox, the one of the right (after adjustments) more closely resembles what I was seeing on the iPad when I was working on it.

The iPad will not replace my Wacom tablet and Photoshop anytime soon, so you might wonder why I bother.  It really is just for the fun and the challenge of it.  I’m enjoying seeing just how far I can take a painting before I can’t go any further.  This is equivalent to painting in low-res in Photoshop and that translates directly to my more detailed paintings because they all start in low-res.  Working on the iPad with limited tools and resolution does end up making my more detailed work better because it forces me to do my best on the foundation of the painting before working on the fine details.

While I intended this to end at being an iPad painting, I’m toying with the idea of bringing it into Photoshop, bumping up the resolution and making a full size, full resolution painting out of it, because I know I can take it further.  It’ll mean working a number of more hours on it, but I think the end result might be something I’ll be proud of.

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A dog and his painting.

Regular readers will know the story by now, but long story short, my friend Pat Wendt in Lincoln, Nebraska has this wonderful little dog named Don Diego.  When it came time to record my animal painting DVD for PhotoshopCAFE, I thought he’d be the perfect subject.  Since Pat is a talented photographer, I knew I’d get a great reference photo to work from, and I certainly did.  In exchange for the use of her photo (and her dog), I gave her some prints, copies of both of my DVD’s, my undying gratitude and the framed stretched canvas painting that you see here.

When it comes to digital painting, the finished piece ends up being a digital file, so when it comes to ‘the original’, it’s whatever the artist certifies as such.  As I included a certificate of authenticity with the painting, Pat now owns the original of this work.  It’s hanging in the bookstore, Bluestem Books, that she and her husband Scott own in Lincoln.  I asked Pat to take this photo for me so that I could see the painting with the subject.

Now there’s a dog with charisma!

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Titus

This painting was finished in mid-August, but I couldn’t post it until today.  The client had it done to give to her sister for her birthday this past weekend.  I had a lot of time to work on this, as it was ordered early in the year, so it was a long deadline, which is a rare but welcome thing.  It was printed and stretched on canvas at a size of 12″X16″.

Titus is an interesting story.  He passed away last year at the very ripe old age of 24, which is VERY senior for a cat.  Apparently he lived a great life, was a home and shop cat for their printing company and very lovable.  Having lost one of our own cats earlier this year, I’m recently acquainted with the pain of that loss, and was actually going through it while working on this one.  This gift was a very special one and I worked long hours on it.  The client was very happy with the final result and told me that her sister was as well, so that makes me happy.

Some challenges on this one.  While I had a LOT of reference photos to choose from, they were all low-res in an online photo album.  Basically no detail shots to work with at all.  The client couldn’t very well ask her sister for better photos without giving away that a gift of some sort might be in the works.  So I just had to work with what I had.  On my DVD for painting, I talk about different tricks to make less-than-great photos usable for reference and I had to use them all.  I found myself looking at my own cat for some of the more detailed fur and features, even though her colouring is completely different.  It worked, though.

I gave her the option of my usual caricature style or the more portrait style that I did of Don Diego for my DVD.  I was a bit relieved that she chose the former, because even though Titus still doesn’t look really happy in this painting, it’s a lot better than any of the photos depicted.  Dogs seems to smile naturally, just because of the shape of their mouth and muzzle.  Cats, not so much.  They just don’t often look pleased, but that’s part of their attitude that cat people love so much.  Good thing they purr and can make their eyes seem three times bigger when they want something.

Titus apparently liked to sit in the ‘paper cage’, a really large recycling bin for a mix of scrap and shredded paper and the client thought he should be in that setting.  I thought it was a great idea, because it made it even more of a personal image.  Painting the paper was tough, because I still wanted detail so that it didn’t look muddy, but not so much that it took away from the cat, because he is obviously the most important part of the painting.  This is the reason I left out any text on the paper.

I enjoy painting commissions.  Unfortunately, because of the work involved, not everybody can afford to give such a gift.  I’m very aware of this when I create a painting, and try to put my best effort into each one of them.  This was no exception and I consider it one of my best pieces.

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Golden Mantle Ground Squirrel – iPad Painting

This grumpy little fellow is a Golden Mantle Ground Squirrel.  They’re found in a number of places around here in the Bow Valley, and it’s usually pretty easy to get photos of them.

I painted this on the iPad using the Procreate app and the Wacom Bamboo stylus.

Even though I really like working on the iPad and using both the app and the stylus, I’m not able to go further than what you see here when it comes to real detail.  But I’m having fun experimenting with it, and if I wanted to take it further in Photoshop, this would serve as a decent foundation.