Emulating traditional painting mediums

Doing color studies like these on the computer is a great learning exercise. You can experiment with oddball color combinations and varying degrees of loose rendering techniques. Even rather mundane scenes can become quite interesting. If you happen to be proficient in painting with watercolors, studies like these will be easy and fun. The more experience that you have with the traditional painting mediums the easier it will be to create art on the computer. If you haven't done much painting with traditional mediums, start now, it will expand your abilities on the computer. Another interesting idea is to do color sketches on the computer that can be used as reference when doing larger paintings with traditional mediums such a watercolor or acrylics. On the computer you can easily do several different color versions of a subject and pick out the best one to use as reference for creating a traditional painting. I have utilized this method occasionally for my acrylic paintings.



CHICAGO AFTERNOON
A rather loose rendition of a nice sunny afternoon in beautiful Chicago. I love Chicago, it's a really great place to live or just visit. This rendering has the feel of a watercolor or loose oil painting. To to create this piece I used Painter Classic 1.0.2, a simplified version of the regular Painter program that was included when you bought a printer or scanner. I'm sure that they still bundle a newer version with certain current printers and scanners.



7TH AVENUE AT 23RD STREET
New York City on a nice hot day. I think that this was done using only Photoshop 5.0, a simplified version of the regular program, similar to the newer Photoshop Elements 2.0. I don't remember whether this was painted directly over a photo or a scanned drawing. If I want to change the elements in the scene I will do a drawing to paint over.



8TH AVENUE AT 25TH STREET
A rather boring scene can be made quite interesting with the use of strong color and dark shadows as design elements. I primarily used Painter Classic to do this painting.



PONT ALEXANDRE III, PARIS
A fairly loose rendition of a Paris scene done in Painter Classic. Paris is a lovely city, I had the good fortune to live and work there for several years. I'll tell you more about that in future postings.
In my next post I show you some examples of portraits and figure studies done on the computer.