Take Ten

I have been in Maui for five weeks.  It was heaven.

While there, I took an ecourse from Tracy Verdugo.  I’ll talk more about this wonderful class in a future post.  It is an amazing painting/mixed media ecourse.  It is absolutely overflowing with wonderful creative material for any kind of artist, including a digital painter like me.  Check out Tracy and future courses here.  Tracy has written a great book entitled Paint Mojo.  That’s what the course was all about, getting on our creative Mojo.  It did.

Tracy not only took us through an entire painting, but gave us an incredible amount of other material.  Each week she gave us several projects to do to rev up our creative juices.  The class was just six weeks, but it will take me many more weeks to finish going through all she offered.

This piece is one exercise from one of the weeks.  We drew a grid and then chose a shape or object to draw.  We were to draw in each box in a different way.  I did a slightly different take on it.

Painter, the app I use to paint with, comes with over 700 brushes in various media.  I have added several hundred more brushes and media.  I have all kinds of media at my hands, not just paint.  Painter will mimic acrylic, oils, pens, pencils, crayon, conté, charcoal, gouache, watercolor, pastels (my favorite at this time), markers, and the list goes on.  It shows strokes in 3D.

I can use any kind of paper texture that I can scan in on my computer.  The brushes will show/interact with the textures of the papers.

There is way more that it can do.  I’ll save that for another post.

I have only been exploring Painter for a short time.  Before becoming ill and not being able to do art, I was doing textiles and mixed media.  I miss that very much.

That is the reason I took Tracy’s course.  I wanted to digitally get back in touch with my artistic roots.  I did, in spades.

Anyway, I decided to do this exercise with just a circle.  I wanted to be able to work in each square with a different media and with various papers.

The first square is a pastel pencil.  The next is pastel used on a paper honeycomb texture, third is a circle brush I used to draw circles.

The second row starts with charcoal on textured paper, changing the size of the paper texture.  The next is one of my pastel brushes on textured paper, again changing the size of the paper’s circles, The last one in this row is impasto used on a sheet of music that I imported into the piece.

The last row starts with a wire brush and then oil and acrylic on textured papers, again changing the size of the paper so its circles become larger and smaller.

Painter is an overwhelming application to use because it does so much.

I have used it for two years.  It has taken me this long just to kind of figure out what it can do.  I was ready to really shake up my “Paint Mojo” and put Painter to work for me, taking me back to my roots.  It has worked.  I am so excited to take off from here and explore more.

I will just add that I am so grateful I am physically able to endure an airplane flight to Hawaii.  It gave me the opportunity of a lifetime.  Warren and I want to spend part of each year traveling now that he is retired.  We are already planning our next trip to Maui.  Some day, I may be well enough to go further.  Who knows?  But I’m very grateful to get to Maui for now.