A couple of weeks ago, Beth and I took a trip to Portland, Maine. It is a great little city. Clean, easy to get around, plenty to do. I highly recommend checking it out
*. Being esteemed members of the Holiday Inn Priority Club (jealous?) we received a complementary upgrade to a sixth floor room with a bay view. It was beautiful. The entire harbor was right outside our window. So, too, were countless playful seagulls.
Being an early riser, I would have about an hour to myself every morning before Beth would begin to stir. It often happens, that when I go on vacation, I get an overwhelming urge to draw. Subsequently that urge is quashed by all the excitement that is being on vacation. Portland being a sleepy town in the morning, and my fiance being a sleepy person in general, I was ready to draw. I sat myself at the desk, took out my pad of paper, grabbed the Holiday Inn ballpoint, and gazed earnestly out the windows. It was beautiful. The sun had just come up. There was a milky haze over the city. The waterfront was devoid of tourists. A couple of skiffs made there way out to their lobster traps. A stunningly quiet moment that had to be captured. I took a deep breath, summoning the courage it takes to first mark the pristine white page, and I drew...
...pigs.
I don't know where the idea came from
**. Maybe I just wanted to draw a pig (it's happened before). I started playing with the expression, "When pigs fly," and thought it might be fun to put a little different spin on it.
Make sure you click on the images to zoom in and catch the punchlines.I should have written this post about the joys of drawing with ballpoint pen, but I'll save that one for later.
*I have no affiliation with the Maine Board of Tourism.
**I really just wanted to draw pigs.
Kevin: You have trained under the deadliest martial artists on the planet. Your wealth and resources dwarf those of some small nations. You are the world's greatest detective, vigilante and overall bad-ass, going toe to toe with the most hardened criminals and demented maniacs in Gotham City. Well Batman, what is missing from this picture?
"He wandered out of the dust of the Mojave with nothing but the clothes on his back. He wasn't too pretty, and he wasn't much of a talker...But that cow-boy sure could ride."
out.
Besides the pencil, there is no tool that I use more than my Wacom Intous 3 tablet and Adobe Photoshop. It takes up very little room (about 10.5 x 13.5 inches on my computer desk), can accomplish limitless affects, and there is no clean-up. I love this thing.
The struggle with digital painting is to avoid the slickness that comes naturally with the soft (and accident forgiving) brushes that come with photoshop. I found that many of my early attempts at digital painting had the consistency of a stretched out balloon. A dry, rubbery feeling. Not a bad weapon for the artistic arsenal, but it can look strange. This fellow on the left, for example, looks as though he were blown up from the inside. Looks like he rather enjoyed the experience.
I have found a method that I believe brings out the feel of oil on board or canvas. It works for me anyway. I like to use a mixture of multi-point digital brushes (harder than an air brush but softer than that pencil edge) and the smudge tool. I avoid working in layers as mush as possible, treating the digital painting the same way I would an oil painting on canvas. I lay down color with the brush and then smear it around with the smudge tool, just the way I would smear the oils with my finger (you know you love finger painting). I generally use the smudge to to help define how hard or soft my edges will be. It is very versatile. I think that the effect works. As you can see from this digital-oil sketch, there is a tactile quality to the color that is lacking in the balloon man above. You can imagine that slippery/squishy feel of the soft and wet (had to tie in the title somewhere) paint. My hope is that people wouldn't even stop to consider how this was created.
