Bird Stamps

 

 

 

As I blogged before, I recently took an ecourse from Tracy Verdugo.  During the course, Tracy took us through a painting for six weeks.  In addition to the painting we did, each week, there were other projects and creative ideas given to us.

The ecourse was for mixed media artists.  I took this course because Painter, the app I use to paint with digitally, is actually a treasure trove of mixed media.  I wanted and needed some fresh ideas.  I had spent the previous two years just figuring out how to get paint on canvas in Painter.  I wanted to start exploring all the other media that is in Painter.

One week during the course, Tracy had people take some material similar to the trays meat comes in at the store.  Then people made a kind of stamp out of these by pressing down with a dry pen.  Everyone was making fantastic stamped art.

That left me kind of out in left field.  What to do?  Everyone was making these great stamped art pieces.  So I put on my thinking cap.  This is the creative nudge I had wanted, I just needed to figure out how to do the process in digital.  I decided to make stamps in Painter. 

Painter lets me make my own brushes.  I can “capture” any drawing that I want and make it into a brush.  This makes for very interesting brushes.  So,I decided to make a bird to paint with.  I drew nine different birds, captured them and made them into brushes/stamps.

As an aside, let me say that the term “brush” in Painter, is used very loosely.  It can mean anything.  Like a crayon, charcoal, pastel, conté, and now for me, stamp.

I took each bird stamp and started playing with it.  It was so much fun and I had a blast.  I used varying effects, changed sizes, colors and amounts of paint going into the stamp.

In the pieces above, you can see some of the birds I made.  Each piece is done using only the bird stamps.

I can paint on layers in Painter.  Each layer has an opacity setting from 0 to 100%.  Additionally, each layer has 22 “methods” that can be applied to the layer.  These methods go by names such as color, luminosity, reverse out, hue, etc.  I used various layers with various methods to get the backgrounds in each piece.

Since doing these pieces, I took a class on what Painter calls its Brush Engine.  Making brushes in Painter is very complex and highly technical.  However, now with more knowledge about how to apply various effects to my brushes, I see many more ways I can use stamps like these in the future in my art.

I finally feel that I am starting to handle Painter instead of it handling me.  I will talk more about the brush class and its importance in a future post.