Watercolour Architecture – Using digital software to plan a traditional painting

July 31, 2016October 11, 2016Leave a comment

As an artist, i’m happy to use any tools that help me create my artistic vision. Over the centuries artists have been pretty amazing at creating simple tools to translate the incredibly complex world around them. The viewfinder is a perfect example of this, as is the plumbline: a rectangle with a hole in it and a piece of string with a weight on the end. Awesome.

But, the user still needs to understand the proces of using these simplistic tools. If you don’t understand the idea of negative shapes or how to find a good composition, a viewfinder is not going to make you an artist. It’ll make you into someone looking at the world through the hole in a rectangle.

Digital tools come under this same class for me, although I appreciate they are more complicated to work at times then the trusty viewfinder. For my most recent paintings of Kedleston Hall I wanted to focus on the architecture and how light plays off the different planes of the building. I didn’t want to just draw a fancy house, I wanted to add my own creative flair and vision to what I saw.
So, I kept my colour palette simple. Like, really simple. Three colours in total to create each painting, which would keep things nice and harmonious so I could concentrate on the interesting compositions instead.

In photoshop I adjusted a reference photo to play with tonal contrast and composition, the best way I find to do this is when it’s in black and white. Then I go back to the original photo and play around with colour. This helps me visualise lots of different combinations. Doing it digitally like this is a lot faster then trying to do it with traditional mediums, plus I can tweak them cleanly. The last image above has been pixelated so its easier to focus purely on the range of colours and no the compositions details.

Once I have my colours sorted, I can then choose which colours to have in my palette. From there I do a small mock up to help me figure out the best way to apply them and to get me used to mixing the colours. Then, when I come to create the final painting, i’ve already done all my prep so a lot of the stress has been taken away and I can relax and enjoy the painting process.

——————————————————————

Starting to do VJing or how to set-up live digital art events

July 29, 2016July 24, 2016Leave a comment

I want to quickly show you one of my first live art events, how it was set up and how I engaged people in the content. When I do live art events, I want to incorporate participation into the events entertainment and have this effect the structure of my live art. It’s so much more interesting for me when i don’t know what images i’ll be working on at each event!

By live art I mean digital/traditional painting that is done infront of the audience instead of a pre-made recording or animation. I know the term VJing is used alot for big events with artists working live but i’m not sure I fall into this catgory yet. I probably do but for now I like the term live art as I think it suits it better.

The event:
For the RoCH: Fans and Legends launch event at QUAD a couple of months back, I created a set-up where i created a backdrop and then asked the audience to take photos of themselves in dynamic poses and email these photos to me. I would then incorporate these photos into the scene infront of them, redesigning how they looked to fit the event theme of martial arts.

It was a fun session to do and there was a lot of participation, laughter and opportunity for the audience to come and talk to me as I worked.

The Set-up
The set up was very low tech, I had my laptop with photoshop, my wacom tablet, a projector and a screen to project onto. And a wifi connection as well, this is an important aspect as if I can’t get the photos people are sending me, I don’t have a resouce to work with. Kinda awkward…

One of the main things to bare in mind when you’re first looking into doing this, is the projectors lumen number. The higher this is, the better quality the image is going to be once projected and it also decides how powerful the projector will be. For the small scale set-up I had I didn’t have to be too picky, the projector just had to be good enough to see the details and colours and it was only projecting a short way so power wasn’t an issue either. If you want to project outside or onto a building, then you’ll need to look into higher powered projectors.

Instructables has a few great tutorials for outside projecting and its definately something i’ll be looking to do next year.

You can see from the photos that the event was a success and it helped me to understand how people like to engage with this kind of artwork. It was fascinating for me to see others so interested in the various brushes setting and image editing tools, which for me have become somewhat boring due to using them so often. Seeing how people enjoyed watching the image develop reaffirmed to me that this way of doing live art is something I want to keep exploring.

Derby Museums Exhibition: EVERYONE

July 27, 2016July 24, 2016Leave a comment

Derby Museum and Gallery did a call out for artworks responding to the theme EVERYONE – Your place in the world. I have never responded to an artist call out before and I felt that this would be a lovely starter exhibition to enter.

As I want to develop my place to be outside painting, I chose an area of Derbyshire that I particularly liked, Dovedale in Ilam and created a design from a photo I recently took there. Obviously lots of deep thought going on for the idea behind this piece! Sometimes it’s nice just to paint your view of a place, which is what I set out to do here.

I sketched two designs first to give myself some practice and generate how I wanted the scene to look. The top once was too cold but quite cold to the actual colours, and the bottom one was a tad too psychadelic but I liked the idea of addng characters to the composition to give the view someone to connect to. I then sketched the design onto canvas! I’ve included below my rouch sketchbook pages to see the process i went through. Nothing very complicated but it helped to get my thoughts in order and I could figure out what colours mixed well with others and how I could eliminate other colour options that would ruin the balance of the piece.

I used Gouache as my medium as i’m used to watercolours but I want to learn more about how to layer opaque paints, making Gouache the perfect middle ground. They were very easy to wipe off though at the beginning when I was adding new layers but eventually I got my under painting to how I wanted the colour structure to go.

From there I just kept on refining the detail! I wish I had a good reference for a person in this kind of light but ended up having to work from memory and imagination ( dangerous combo when trying to get things looking realistic! ) and the final piece didn’t look too odd thankfully. I used some interactive acrylics for some colours I couldn’t make with my Gouache and for some of the whites.

On Being scared to sketch

July 24, 2016July 24, 2016Leave a comment

I think this predicament is common and that it’s something that many professional and hobby artists deal with and that yes, it does get easier in time but not with age (as we know when watching children sketch…They’re so darn carefree!). Something I have been dealing with for a long time is why, even though I love art and get inspired by nature and constantly look at other artworks and read various art books, I don’t draw and paint half as much as I should. Why all the procrastination? Why all the anxiety and fear at the beginning? What’s the deal brain, I thought this was what you wanted to do!

Silly brain…I think it’s just overwhlemed. By inadvertantly putting pressure on what i’m about to produce, my vision and thoughts that i’m going to capture by drawing, by judging it before i’ve even made a mark….I create a dream artwork before the real artwork even has a chance to begin to create itself and it will never match up to all the half formed ideas that are in my head, merging together.

I think the best thing to do when you’re scared to even start to sketch is to stop thinking of it as a finished piece of artwork and think of it as an exploratory journey. What am I looking at? What an interesting leaf! The way there is a rhythm going through all the branches is relaxing to look at, how does it look if I try to capture it with these kind of marks. Hm, not so good, i’ll make a note of that and remember it for the next sketch I do. How big are these leaves compared to the ones in the background? How will my mark-making change? How much space do they take up compared to the foreground leaves?

Knowing different drawing techniques is still a must, but sometimes we forget that they’re just advice to help us, things people have learnt in the past through trial and error and have passed along as a good way of achieving a particular task. As an artist, you’re allowed to have your own trial and errors and to find your own way of capturing things that you’ve discovered on your own exploratory journeys. The creative jumps and experiments that you make based on your own tastes and judgements help to create new processes.

So don’t be scared to start sketching, there isn’t a need for fear or anxiety here, just curiousity and a desire for discovery. Plus, you don’t have to show anyone if you don’t want to but it can fun to chat about your discoveries and errors with other artists. Share the journey you’re both on and laugh at things that didn’t go quite right but look kinda funny now…

Walk Draw Explore

Month: July 2016

Watercolour Architecture – Using digital software to plan a traditional painting

Starting to do VJing or how to set-up live digital art events

Derby Museums Exhibition: EVERYONE

On Being scared to sketch