Lady Water

I don't know if I like this work or not. I thought that the concept could be interesting (water in all her three forms, solid, liquid, and "vapor", let's say, also inspired by the snow melting during these sunny days up here), but during the painting process I realized that the result just sucks, despite the efforts I wanted to put in rendering details, composition and so on. It feels like I'm not able to produce a decent work despite the amount of my free time I'm consuming on painting and practice.

So, I don't feel to go on with this work any longer, and I edit it just like that.

Below I put a couple of details, as usual:

Alexander the Little

When your mother-in-law asks you for a portrait of your child, of course you try to do your best. Anyway, I decided not to paint something traditional, but a picture closer to my own taste, so I put a hint of fantasy in this picture.

Both subject and painting title ironically enough refer to the "dictatorial" attititude of our toddler, but more fit to his age: so, he wouldn't ride a powerful horse, but a frog; his head will not be crown with laurel, but with blueberry leaves and wild strawberries, which are the fruits he loves the most. The landscape and vegetation are typical of Northern Sweden, where he's born, but the dress has something to do with his half-mediterranian ancestors.

This work has experienced some annoying hardware problems (mentioned in the post below), so I had to re-paint it; however, I was happy to realize that the re-painting process has been much faster.

Anatomy has been a big issue in this painting, since it is very hard to convince a 2-years old to stay quiet a couple of seconds and pose in the way and light you wish; thus, I had to use several photo references to deal with it, and I'm still not satisfied. The child was drawn by pencil after photos, then scanned and painted over in Photoshop (I find Photoshop not very suitable for sketching, since its pencil is too slow compared with hand's movements), everything else was painted directly on canvas.

Other photo references of mine have been inspirating for painting the frog, some plants and the background, and much work was done going around in nature and looking at landscape elements. This painting has been the most demanding work I've done in Photoshop until now, but I hope I'll be better with time.

Below follow some close-ups:

Genetically modified #1

This time I wanted to do something almost finished with Photoshop. The strange and odd shapes and colours of plants and mushrooms are always been among my favourites, so I did a quick sketch during a lunch break:

And here is the final version after several hours under the Wacom pen. I wish I could be a little faster.

The original psd. file has a much better resolution, but I had to resize the picture quite a lot to make Blogger accept it.

Norwegian Volcano

Last 90 minutes exercise of my sick leave (from tomorrow I'll be less productive with Photoshop).

This time I copied a coastal landscape from Northern Norway, but adding a completely new and odd subject, a volcano. I wanted to insert the new element so that the final effect would nevertheless be realistic (hopefully). My boyfriend complaines that it doesn't look enough epic and cool; well, I'll try something more cool when I'll became more skilled, since I don't want to paint something which at the end can for sure look ridiculous (this is a common mistake among beginners, I think...)

1 hour 30'

Today I'm sick so I've time to do something. To get faster I got the suggestion that I should paint some quick sketches in no more than 90 minutes each.  Here are the (embarrassing) results:

A picture of my son from a photo. I'm not happy at all with proportions and especially with the face, but I'll try harder.

Then, another landscape from a photo taken one summer from our cottage:

I think I must paint more and more of these 90 minutes-sketches, it helps a lot. I must admit that I feel much more comfortable with landscapes. May I'll get specialized on that stuff.

A Winter Story

At the end, our computer has been fixed and I could quickly finish a winter landscape, copied from a picture taken by my boyfriend some years ago, in the mountains of Lappland. This painting is intended as something in between a sketch and a more detailed work, anyway I didn't want to spend too much time on it.

This time it was not a problem to manage many layers to paint several levels (river, trees, sky, mountains, snow, and so on). I tried many kind of fur brushes in order to get a somehow realistic effect about the trees in the background. I know that there are special tree brushes which can do the same but in a much better way; maybe I'll try to get them in the future.

I realize that is quite convenient to get a palette directly from the photo where the subject is taken from. At the beginning I felt a bit reluctant to use this method (it sounds as cheating), but on the other hand it can be very useful to learn how a good palette should look like when you'll start to paint a similar but not copied image.

Another oil copy

I did not practice so much with digital painting in the last weeks, since I had another urgent project to complete.

This summer, my mother-in-law became 70 and was asked about a nice birthday present. Her wish, a painting to their flat, turned out to be one of the works of the spanish artist Ramón Pujol, who usually paints very beautiful coastal landscapes from Mediterranean. Unfortunately, such a painting can cost around 3000 €, which is quite above our budget, and we agreed that I would have tried to paint it as a Christmas present instead. I chosed to reproduce "Harbour at last light", which is a picture of Portofino, because of the pleasant bright palette and the many elements present in the composition (sea, mountains and buildings). This would have also been a good exercise for me to practise landscape, water and reflections effects on it, and a little perspective.

(picture taken from the Internet)

Here comes the result of my attempt to reproduce this painting (since it is a photo the colours aren't the same as in my painting) :

As a disclaimer, the latter cannot be considered a false, since it is quite evident that proportions, colours and especially the quality of the work are not close to the original.

I'm not really sure if I'm really satisfied with this work. Perspective at the boats is not correct, and the copy do not show the same clean realistic touch which can be admired in the original of Pujol. Some of the houses on the left side are not really parallel with the coast line! On the other hand, it is just my second oil painting after many many years. And, my mother-in-law has not the possibility to directly compare my work with the original one, so I hope she will not notice these details...

The first digital: Northern Light

The very first time I start to paint digital was in October this year, when I needed a picture of the first northern light I saw, for my other blog. All I had were:

1) a quick pencil sketch taken six years ago:

2) the Photoshop program and a Wacom set (pen and tablet), that my boyfriend has at home (he is art director in a own computer game company, so he has a lot of these stuff).

I never hold a Wacom pen in hand previously and was quite unfamiliar with Photoshop as well. As a beginner, I found that there were many issues with this new technique:
- with the Wacom pen you experience a lack of direct feeling with the material you're working with: one cannot feel the texture of paper, or the pressure of pencil/pen/brush. Even if I feel a bit confident by drawing with pencil, I must say that I was completely handicapped with the digital one;
- what you're drawing doesn't appear directly under your hand, but in the screen: you need a new way to coordinate eyes and hand;
- it takes a while learning how to manage different layers in Photoshop.

On the other hand, the possibilities offered by the digital techniques are much larger compared with the traditional ones, so I thought it was worth trying. That's why this blog is called A Wacom Journey.

Here comes the final picture. It is a very simple work, nevertheless I can get the same feeling I had watching the Northern light six years ago. The first step was to correct all writing and other flaws from the original photo, then create and paint distinct layers for sky, landscape and northern light on the background base.