This is an abstract watercolor that I recently did on my iPad Pro in Procreate. I did it using new watercolors that I recently purchased from Max Ulchiney.
They are really fun brushes to use. They feel a whole lot like you are using real watercolors. It also includes a wax crayon that I have come to love.
This is a painting I recently did in Corel Painter 2019. Painter is an app for the computer. It has just about every type of artistic media you can think of: pens, pencils, oils, watercolor, pastel, crayons, etc. It literally has hundreds of brushes. Over the years, I’ve collected thousands of brushes.
It has a pretty steep learning curve. But there are lots of videos available and classes available.
I did this piece using brushes I made myself. I pretty much only use brushes that I make anymore. I find that after having used Painter for such a long time, I’m very particular about my brushes. I want a brush(es) that’s going to do exactly what I want it to do.
I like getting new brushes from others, but I always will tweak them a bit to suit my needs.
Enjoy!
I am taking a class from my friend Tricia Dewey. It is called Obscured. You can check it out here.
We are working on portraits and obscuring them. It’s very interesting.
We are working on our iPads. The main app we are using is Art Studio Pro. It is very close to Photoshop. I am pleasantly surprised by this. It is a very robust app and you can use very large documents with many layers and we are using 50 undo levels.
You can import all the Photoshop brushes, gradients, patterns, etc.
We are also using Snapseed, and Repix.
In this image I started with iColorama using the Brush in Rebound to lay down textures and then moved into Art Studio Pro as well as the other two apps.
Tricia has many other wonderful classes at her web site that are well worth checking out.
These apps can all be used on the iPhone.
Have a great day.
This is my latest painting done in Corel Painter 2018 and Rebelle by Escape Motions.
I started it in Rebelle which is a fabulous app that mimics watercolors. It acts exactly like you are painting with real watercolors! Absolutely amazing. I use it to make drips. Which Painter just can’t do.
I ended up covering up all the drips but I left some of the watercolor blending. It’s really so subtle and wonderful.
In Painter I used acrylics to paint in textures. You get textures based on which papers you choose. Then you adjust your brush settings to the amount of paper texture you want.
After that I moved on to my present favorite thing to do. That is add liquid inks. They paint on their own layer. That’s because their layer had these special settings where you can tell the ink to become thick. Which I did. So that’s the lines that are standing up. Also the dots on those lines.
I finished with regular inks.
A very fun piece to work on.
Definitely this piece was an adventure for me.
Enjoy your day!
This is an image that was done on my iPad using a great app called iColorama. It is also available for the iPhone. It is difficult to fully explain this app. It works in layers but I think only two at a time. I’m currently taking a class to better understand it. It has tons of effects that you can’t even begin to wrap your head around. Then it has brushes. It’s possibilities are unlimited. But in many ways it is not, to me intuitive. At least not coming from Painter, Photoshop and Lightroom, Plus there is no manual. A really odd thing in my opinion. Previously, the app has left me in tears of frustration.
So this class is proving extremely helpful.
After I got done with this in iColorama, I did put it in Procreate and paint the light areas on the yellow petals.
To be honest, this was a pretty crummy photo. I’m amazed it turned out so well. The upper left was completely blown out. To fix that I did take the piece into an app called Touch Retouch which is an all time favorite app of mine. I cloned the blue background on the upper left. I love technology.
Have a great evening.
This is my most recent painting that I did in Painter. I started it in Rebelle as usual. Rebelle is a digital watercolor app that works just like real watercolor. It is written by digital artists.
I used Artist Oil brushes that I made to paint this. If anyone is interested in these bruins, drop me a line.
This was a very fun piece to paint. I love the colors I chose. They made my mouth water.
Something I discovered in this painting is that I used a more muted color for the leaves. This plays off the bright colors in the flowers and makes the bright show off more.
I know that the impressionists used grey in their paintings to show off their bright colors. I’ve just never totally understood that. But I see it in these leaves and flowers.
Enjoy your day!
I’ve Seen You Before
This is a painting that I did in Corel Painter. I promise I won’t bitch about Painter or tech support at Corel. Actually, in Painter 2018, things are going very smoothly. Painter released in this version some stability to the application that seems very nice. They also released for their trick to get you to buy it and/or upgrade a thing called thick paint. They claim this looks like real paint. Well hold it, Corel, what have we been using all these years? Has our paint not looked like real paint all along?
Anyway, maybe this looks more like real paint. I’m just not sure. But boy is this stuff thick. It is like painting with gloop. I initially stuck my nose up at it and said no way am I painting with this stuff. Not only because it was gloop but because it has its own separate layer. It has a separate layer that does not act like a real layer. So it is isolated. It will not do many of the things a layer should do. Plus the brush engine for the thick paint has a lot of controls to figure out.
In the past, Corel rolls out its latest trick brushes and then the next year it acts like it never heard of these brushes. You are left holding the bag as to these brushes. Well, why should I learn the complex brush engine of these brushes if Corel is just going to move on to some other trick brushes next year?
Eventually, when I took Skip Allen’s Introduction class, I came to love the brushes Skip made and I used some of these brushes. But, I’m holding off judgment on them. I’m not embracing them yet because I’m concerned Corel will not develop them further in the future. For example see the Dynamic Speckle Brushes that were developed a couple of years ago. They have great potential. But still need some tweaking. Hello, Corel, are you ever going to tweak those brushes? No. The program is full to the brim of brushes that need a tweak here and a tweak there.
Anyway, I bitched about Corel Painter. I guess it’s the best thing out there, but they sure can make a person angry with their shortcomings.
This painting I did with my thick paint brushes that I was in the process of making before I knew Corel was going to come out with thick paint brushes. I started working with the impasto brushes to see how thick I could make them and have them look like real paint.
In the impasto control panel you can pick the depth method. It is right below the Draw To box. The Draw To box is where you pick Color and Depth for impasto. I swear I have never noticed the Depth Method box before. Probably because the print is so small and there are so many options in Painter. There is always something new to discover.
Anyway, I started using Paper for Depth Method and it opened a whole new world in Impasto. Wow!!! I have a huge collection of papers that give me lots of different depths. But even if you don’t, just using Painter’s default papers give you a huge variety of textures. This is especially true if you adjust the contrast and brightness to the paper. I take the contrast up and bring the brightness down usually. I believe that Painter reads the dark areas of paper. Or else it reads the white areas. But, I’m pretty sure it reads the dark areas. But experiment for yourself if you need to actually know. The other adjustments you can make to the paper are the paper scale which can be very important. Then there is an adjustment for rotation which can play an important part. Then new to Painter on the grain setting is the Random Grain Rotation setting and the Random Grain Position setting. I really like the first one. It makes your strokes on a piece of paper look very real. Without this setting, you are just repeating a digital pattern.
Be sure to have Grain Expression set to pressure. Then, and this one I consider essential, be certain that you have set the Brush Calibration for the individual brush. I think it is essential to do this. There are many that believe that global brush calibration is ok. That just is not true, in my opinion. Set Brush Calibration for every brush. It makes a huge difference.
I painted this picture with some of my new impasto brushes. While I was doing that I started goofing around with Liquid Inks. I then remembered that if you went into the layer settings for Liquid Ink, it would cause the Liquid Ink to become thick and raise up and become 3D. Wow!!! Awesome!
OK, Painter really is an awesome app!!!! It does some awesome things.
So then, I decided, I would have to add some of the thick paint that I wasn’t liking so much. So grudgingly I put some on here and there with the fabulous brushes that Skip made (see my earlier blog for information on the Intro Class to 2018). All in all, this was a really fun painting to do.
Oh!!!! I have to tell you, I have fooled around with this painting since 2014! I have repeatedly tried to paint it with nothing but failure! But I got it out this time, now in 2017, and it just came together. So, never give up on a painting, no matter what.
If you are interested in my brushes and want them, drop me an email.
Kerry
Kerry C. Mitchell's Adventures 