New Paintings

Through the DAA (Digital Art Academy), I belong to Karen Bonaker’s Painter Club.  For $50.00 every six months, she puts together excellent three to four hour video tutorials and provides us with great brushes for Painter that she custom makes.

This month was flowers.  The idea of this tutorial was to do one piece using complementary colors and the next piece to use colors from nature.  Complementary colors are those that are opposite each other on the color wheel.  I chose red and green for my first piece.

I started the piece by laying in some light color with a watercolor brush.  Then I used a new brush Karen had provided to dab in some greens.

In Painter X3, Corel added a new feature for the brushes called Jitter.  This had been available before, but now it is available in the grain, opacity and several other settings.  It is supposed to give the brush a more natural look.  I don’t know if it does or not.

I used Karen’s Poppy Brush, with jitter set to four, to make the impressionist-like flowers. Then I turned the jitter option off and made the sharper flowers.

To give some interest to this piece, I used what are called Overlays to start to do something to the background. The first one was a pink and blue one Karen had made.

In Painter, I placed this overlay into the painting on a layer and changed the layer to multiply.  When I add multiply to the layer it becomes transparent.  The colors show, but do not cover the layers underneath.

Next, I used a pattern overlay.  In Painter, patterns are usually just that, patterns.  They can be added in all kinds of ways into the painting.  In this case, the pattern I used was also made by Karen Bonaker.  It was an overlay.  Have I thoroughly confused everyone?

I took down the opacity in both overlays and let just a bit of each show through.  You can see just shades of the pink and blue overlay.  If you look in the stems closely, you can see the drips from the pattern overlay.

After the overlays, I went back with a new leaf brush Karen had provided in this month’s brushes.  I added in a lot of green to the mid area of the painting.

I finished by adding in some stems with a couple of different brushes.

To finish this piece, I used an effect called Equalize.  This adjusts the white and black values of the painting and gives it pop.

The second piece, I am not all that happy with, but I decided to post it.  It started out as a flower, then turned into a landscape.  I spent way too much time on it.  I am determined to start doing my work without taking so long.  I think things turn out better when they are more spontaneous.

At the moment, I’m very confused whether I want to paint realistically or stick to my abstracts.  I really think I use my imagination more in the abstracts.  But the landscapes and realistic pieces seem to be calling my name.

Stay tuned to see what happens.