Pink Pansy
Pink Pansy. Digital Painting done with Artrage. April 2013
Pansies come in all colours and shades. They are typical early spring flowers because they can take cold nights.
This was also done with Artrage Studio Pro and the felt pen tool.
Abstract with pearls
Abstract with pearls. Digital painting, done with Artrage. March 2013
This was the result of 40 minutes playing around with colours, brushes, composition and the sticker spray in Artrage.
Back to the good old colour chart
Colour chart with various green shades.
Some coloured pencil experts stress the importance of putting up colour charts. I must admit that I haven’t done many, but sometimes I do. Here is the one I did yesterday. I am working on a coloured pencil piece with a background in various shades of green. I have been using baby oil as a kind of solvent in my last paintings, and doing this I noticed that the colours get more vibrant this way and even change a bit.
Knowing this I wanted to test the effect in order to select the proper pencil. I used emerald green, juniper green and chromoxide green as the basic greens and added my other greens. I was surprised what a nice green I got using the emerald green and other greens – in the past I hadn’t used emerald green because of its unnatural look.
So now I now, and I am glad that this colour chart will help me doing the background.
Tree Wizard
Wizard Tree. Coloured Pencils on drawing cardboard. March 2013
This is the second coloured pencils drawing which is based on a digital painting. The first one, the eagle, you can see here.
I feel that I’ve discovered quite an interesting way to get ideas for a coloured pencil drawing – play around in Artrage, have the result printed out and then think about how to do a coloured pencil drawing based on that digital piece. “Based” does not mean copying it–when you compare the drawing with the digital painting here you’ll notice that there is quite a difference between the two images.
The other thing is that I used baby oil and markers as solvents on this piece. I used a warm grey #3 marker on the dark green background and I used baby oil for parts of the tree, parts of the water and for the green grass.
The Mysterious Merboy
The mysterious merboy. Digital painting done with Artrage. April 2013
I called this mysterious underwater being a “merboy” because it definitely is not a mermaid. It is however a mixture of something fishy with tentacles, and parts of a human body.
It was fun experimenting with all kinds of Artrage tools – the glitter and the sticker spray, the felt pen, the palette knife used for blending.
Horse on the paddock
Horse on the paddock. Digital Drawing April 2013
This is – so far – the last of my digital horse sketches. I learned quite a lot doing these sketches. I am a lot more familiar with the graphic tablet now. I got acquainted with the pencil tool in Artrage and its various settings. And of course I learned a lot about the anatomy of the horse (although I have to admit that there are loads more to learn) and I also learned to look very closely at my references.
And above all – it was fun!
Here you can find my other horse sketches:
Pansy
Pansy. Painted in #artrage with the felt pen tool. April 2013
I only recently discovered the felt pen tool in Artrage. This felt pen tool can be transformed into a copic marker by changing the settings in a certain way. I like the almost watercoloury look and the way the colours are blending.
I also rediscovered the site “colourlovers.com“. It is a place where you can set up color palettes. I set up a colour palette with violets and blues (five colours go into one palette), saved them on my computer and then imported the jpg into Artrage as a reference image. I could easily pick the colours using the palette.
Cat portrait
Quick cat portrait sketch, done with artrage.
After having done a few horse sketches in Artrage I wanted to focus on another animal – cats. I have lots of cat postcards from a postcard calender bought some years ago, so having references was no problem.
However one needs more than good references to produce a presentable sketch. Getting used to the stylus and the graphic tablet is one thing; getting the proportions right and the colour the other. It definitely needs a lot of eye-hand-coordination!
Cat cartoon
Cartoon cat
I sketched the cartoon cat with a ballpoint pen, scanned the drawing, imported it first into photoshop, then into Artrage, coloured it and then reimported it into photoshop to resize and crop it.
Phoenix
Phoenix. Digital Painting done with Artrage. Apriil 2013
I love Artrage because you can sling paint with this software without the necessity to make it right from the beginning. I used photoshop to frame the piece and to resize it to a prober web size.
