June 2 painting(s)

 Thus inspired by yesterday's lesson on ArtistsTouch as "just rubbing" (yesterday's being done with the finger painting tool), today I went bezerk.  Nicely, of course.  This is Amida Buddha using the oil brush tool and swishing about.  It is a very effective oil painting, which also means there isn't much detail - mostly just the illusion of detail and values - around the face.  Overall I like it, especially since oil painting for real will never happen in my lifetime.

 Then I went to watercolor.  This was awful.  The swishing about produced these fat ribbons of photo color (and pallid at that), and I quickly knew I wasn't going to mess around much with watercolor.  (Which is funny because in ArtRage, that's the Tool of Choice...)

 When I got to the pencil tool and the same ugly swishy (only with graphite particles) happened, I went back again and followed the "tutorial"  and followed its instructions (starting with large brush and swishing the entire thing, moving to medium brush to articulate shapes and some of the details, finally zooming in with the small brush for small details).  LOOK AT THAT FACE!  I liked the pencil tool a great deal for its ability to both shade large swashes of colors and also to bear down and make details out of it.  I would give this a high nod along with oil, and just decide between them based on the subject and if I had areas that needed detail or if I could go with the total oil effect.

This is the air brush, which I hated.  After this one, I tried the remaining tools, such as chalk, crayon, pen, art pen, etc.  (They are not named anywhere except deep in the itunes sales pitch, so I am now guessing what they were.)  None of them were at all satisfactory using The Method of Big Brush, Medium Brush, Small Brush.  But I was very happy with the oil and the pencil work.

June 1 painting

Back in ArtistsTouch after yesterday's experience, and I used the finger tool (and my finger for that matter) and just began rubbing on the reference photo like it was a rubbing on a tombstone.  This is what I got - kind of interesting, and definitely better than the precise lines I was trying to chisel out with a skinny pen and then fill in with the paint bucket in ArtRage.

Is this all there is to it?  The entire "reference manual" for this program has a robotic voice that intones something like, "start with big brush and then go to smaller brushes for details" (or vice versa) and shows an image emerging like magic.

I have to try this same image in each of the tools to see what I get.  It might be as simple as different "finishes" on the same photo painted photo.

May 31 painting(s)

 Working on the Christmas card image, and none too soon.  (Consider that I am posting this nearly two full months after I am actually working on the Christmas card image.  I am one sick, but prepared, puppy.)  I slaved over this in ArtRage - this is my second attempt (the first one being non too round...):  mostly the marker tool outlining each letter and the leaves, and then the paint bucket filling each section in.  All of it on foil paper, and I used Art Studio to put the off balance "Peace on Earth".

It was okay, but kind of sterile.  On a whim, I threw the same reference photo back into good old ArtistsTouch and very carefully painted it in photo colors and a little brush.

What can I say?  This might be the cheap painting program (the two apps actually cost the same but the technology that went into ArtistsTouch is considerably less advanced and works for considerably less advanced artists too), but it just looks alive, and is probably the one I am going to go with.












P.S.  Five days later, I didn't even remember how I did the "final" version above - still don't - but I went back with big brush, then medium brush, then little brush for detail work (per instructions) using the oil tool and I REALLY like this end result.  Unless it's TOO photographic looking?

May 30 painting

I wanted to use the oil paint tool, and I set it for "short dabs", and dabbed away.  Rather liked it, although the poor duck looks like he's standing on an oil slick.

And I busted my stylus from all that heavy pressured dabbing!

May 29 painting(s)

 Well, I did it.  I painted just as shitty on my ipad as I can do in real paint.  And used the same media to do it:  purple pen outline and watercolor.  SHITTY.

I couldn't stand it.  I did a simpler piece and used the crayon tool and enjoyed myself.  The background is the paint tube where I squeezed some of the background colors from the reference picture onto the smooth canvas and smooshed it with the palette tool.  That's artist technical talk for making mud pies.

May 28 painting

San Clemente Flower.  Painted hurriedly and tiredly in watercolor, but on light foil canvas in ArtRage, which (unless otherwise noted) is the new ongoing app of choice.

May 27 painting

Carolyn's chair.  ArtRage app.  I don't know why, but I started focusing in on wanting to REALLY PAINT on my ipad, and ArtistsTouch is fun, but it isn't really painting.  ArtRage definitely is (amazing for a $4.99 app).  I glanced at Art Studio, which is a full service painting program and imports photos, but you can't use the photos for either tracing or reference, just as underpaintings, so ArtRage won after I went back and checked to see if it had layers (it does) (not that I know how to take advantage of that).

This is definitely more primitive looking, but definitely more painterly, and that's what I want.  I uploaded it three times before I noticed that my background color (which is achieved with a bucket of paint and touching where you want it filled, versus clicking on a background color for the canvas as in ArtistsTouch) didn't include (a) between the bars of the chair, (b) didn't include between the top rays of the sun and (c) didn't include between the bottom rays of the sun.  Which I continued to fix.  You can even see the patch where I accidentally swiped a random color above the chair left, showing off to Carolyn of the Chair and then forgot to erase it until after I bucketed everything in sight.  It's tough being me.

Images are going to get a LOT worse now before they get better.  And they may take a lot longer to do as well.  This one took me two days for instance.  I am sufficiently backlogged in posting that it doesn't matter right now, but if there is a gap between days - oh, say, in December - well that's why.