October 2010
Digital Landscape Painting Readers’ Gallery Color Select Your Fall Colors
October is almost gone! Fall is my favorite time of the year. The sights, sounds and aromas are a cornucopia for the senses. Being an artist I love the change of color and the light during this time of year. There are ample opportunities to paint, draw and photograph for the next few months and commissions for Christmas add to the overall feeling of peace. As I was researching this month for the Marketing Buzz piece I came across one of my old blog posts from another site I have. The piece reminded me of my family’s struggle with the decision of me leaving the “security” and solid income from the corporate world. It was difficult and a big risk financially. We took stock of what we really wanted to achieve and how we wanted to live our lives. From that point it was a matter of congruency with what I was writing, what I was teaching my children and my core beliefs. It almost became a necessity to leave and be on my own if I wanted to be “real” to our family. What was I really teaching my kids? I have been a student and teacher of PLR, PMA and the whole arena of self-help for quite a while. So with that background I wrote a little newsletter for us as a family that outlined the goals and reasons I needed to leave the corporate world. It is called the Rat Race Terminator and I only did the one issue. I purchased the domain name ratraceterminator.com so I could later develop a place to leave the story. Recently I reprinted the newsletter so I could revisit the goals and our direction. It was fun to look back and see the beginning of the story. It was also painful as the journey has not always been easy. It has however, been worth it. So this is the season for change, for dreams, for planning. Take stock of your inner desires, plan your dreams and jump in the water. You will be glad you did. ‘Til next time.....Live. Love. Laugh. Tim
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Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
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In This Issue: Digital Landscape Painting by Tim O’Neill
Painting Landscapes by Orjan Svendsen
With Brush & Pen by Barb Hartsook
Readers’ Gallery Right Click Color Select Your Fall Colors by Skip Allen
Cartoon by Victor Lunn-Rockliffe Cover
“Lily Pond and Boat” By Tim O’Neill
Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
Marketing Buzz:
Fables and Fortune Hunters by Tim O’Neill
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Digital Landscape Painting By Tim O’Neill
Select tree leaf tops to paste later
Using Photoshop we are going prepare an image for painting in Corel. Select Image and boost saturation
Open image in Photoshop, I am using PS5 in this example. Click on the adjustment layer icon. (The circle that is half white and half black). In the adjustment layer palette I choose to leave the slider at 15 points of saturation.
Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
We are going to need this image to be a horizontal crop instead of a vertical crop. Before we crop it I know that I am going to want to put back in some of the color at the top of the trees that will come out when I crop it. You will see what I mean in a minute. For now duplicate the background layer by holding the cntrl key down and hitting J (open apple on a MAC). Then grab your marquee tool (shortcut M) and make a selection. Turn off the layer and save this file as a psd.
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Crop Image
This is the cropped image. As you can see we have a blank dark space at the top of the image. I want to fill that by pasting the trees I selected with my marquee tool from step two before we cropped it. Once you save the file as a PSD save it again using an A as an extension. For example 127a. Select your crop tool, C for the shortcut and choose a horizontal crop to your likeing and hit enter. In my case I made it 8.5x11 so it fits the cover parameters of the magazine.
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Drop tree leaves in a top of image
Add Color to trees
To fill that area I will open the other file that we named with an A and find and activate the layer that has just the trees at the top as a selection. Put your stylus or mouse on the activated layer and drag it to your cropped image. Then add a layer mask by clicking on the grey square with a white circle in it located at the bottom of your layers palette. Turn on and off the new layer to see where you need to mask. Take out any pieces that don’t look right using your black brush on the layer mask. Remember specific to layer masks Black reveals - White conceals, meaning if you paint using a black brush you are revealing what is under the mask.
There were no reds in this original photo and I wanted red and yellow in my painting. There are a number of ways to do this but I chose to use an adjustment layer. Click on the adjustment layer icon (half white/half black circle) and choose hue saturation. Click on colorize, position the hue slider to the left choosing red, and move the saturation slider to the right a little. Make sure the colorize box is checked.
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Remove selective color
This may seem like a backwards way to do this but it is fast and effective. Turn off your adjustment layer palette by clicking on the circle in the top right hand corner of the palette. In the layers palette activate the layer with your red color and ad a layer mask. (Click on the grey square with the circle). Choose B for brush and making sure you are on the mask paint with a black brush and remove the color. Then hit x on your keyboard and selectively dab areas of red back to the image. Finally move the opacity on that layer down to your choosing, usually between 50 and 70 percent. Note: Obviously you could just duplicate the layer and choose to paint in red where you want without all of the masking. This method makes it so you don’t have to select color and you can take advantage of the various values by taking the opacity down in the layer you have used for color.
Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
Complete a light dodge and burn in selective areas to further control your viewer’s eye through the image. This will be light as we will do some more in the final piece after it comes from Painter. Flatten your image and save it. That is it, you are ready to take it into Painter so you can paint it any way you want.
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Painting Landscapes By Orjan Svendsen Painting landscapes is something I have always struggled with. It’s so easy to zoom in and get caught up in details right away, only to figure out later on that it doesn’t work as a whole. To avoid this I have watched countless video tutorials and step by step paintings to get a good workflow, and it has greatly improved both time spent and the quality of my finished paintings. In this article I’m going to go over the method I use when painting landscapes. Take note that this is just how I like to do it. There are plenty of other ways that are just as “correct”, so use the method that works well for YOU! I’ll be using Photoshop for this tutorial. Step 1: Unless it’s a speedpaint, I usually start in black & white. I leave both color and values to worry about later and concentrate on the composition and what I want to portray. For me, an empty white canvas is terrifying, so I try to get rid of it as soon as possible. For this I’m using a big and blurry cloud-brush. This helps me focus on the shape and overall composition without tempting me to go into further detail. As we learned in drivingclasses, our eyes are only able to focus on a ridiculously small area at a time, so I want to use this to my advantage later in deciding Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
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the focal point. Making everything sharp now defeats that purpose. Step 2: I’m slowly tightening stuff up now, using a basic round brush at about 75% opacity and fill. Just throwing some branches and roots around to see if it fits. Not yet sure what I want to do about the windows or the entrance to the tree. This is the stage where I start to suggest detail and try to get a good idea of my composition. I’m not making any decisions yet, rather suggesting solutions. When composing a painting, I usually just do what feels right and looks interesting, but I’m not sure about this one yet. Step 3: I have decided on the layout of the painting now. I’m closing the deal on the sketching and moving on to the early rendering. I’m not completely sure about the composition yet,
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but I’m going ahead anyway. Sometimes you don’t see other possibilities right away, so I’m hoping something will come to me. 8
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Step 4: The first step in my rendering process is adding some base texture. I’ve only used two different textures here. One bark texture for the tree trunk and roof, and one leaf texture for the roots and leaves. I’m not doing this so I don’t have to paint leaves or bark, but to create interesting surfaces and colors that I can effectively paint on top of. Using pictures of rusted metal, garbage, rocks or anything for that matter, can work just as well if used right. Anyways, I drag the images into Photoshop and duplicate them several times to cover the areas of use. I set the mode to overlay, multiply or soft light, depending what looks best, and adjust the opacity. For reference, the bark texture on the tree is at about 25%. I usually take an eraser with low opacity and go over the darker areas of the texture to make them less prominent. We don’t want the texture to be the thing catching your attention in the end. After color-adjusting the textures I flatten my image. I do this as often as possible to keep everything flowing together. Step 5: I’ve noticed the roots look very stiff, so adjust them a little. To do this the easy
5 way I go to Filter -> Liquify. This allows me, among other things, to drag and smear the image however I please. (This tool is also great for small adjustments to anatomy if you are painting people.) Quite possibly my most favorite tool after undo. I also adjust the brightness/contrast of the painting by using “Curves”. I’m always adjusting colors and brightness as I notice room for improvement. After that, I make a new layer and start adding some more color. I use a big, round and blurry brush to add some blue to the shadows, some pink backlight and some yellow highlights, each on a separate layer set to “Color”. I then adjust the opacity so it doesn’t look like a neon strip-club sign. When using the “Color” layer-mode, it’s hard to predict how it’s going to turn out, so I always adjust the layers afterwards using “Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation”. This is also why I keep each color on a separate layer. When I’m pleased, I flatten the image again. Now for the fun part! I start painting in some leaves, vines, bark and other stuff by colorpicking the different areas and bumping up the contrast. I don’t want it to look like I just slapped on a texture, so I make sure to go over all the areas that are in focus. I used a small round brush for all of this. For the leaves in the tree I used a leaf-shaped brush. Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
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Step 6: I realize it’s time to do something about the composition. My first thought is that I need some more space on the left side. I also do not want to have a perfectly quadratic canvas, so I add expand the left side instead of just moving the contents to the right. I add another entrance to the tree, while making sure it doesn’t stand out too much, to make it a little more exciting. I also add more roots to try to fill the empty space created by improving the composition. After much consideration about where to take the picture further I decide that I will change the perspective back into what it was initially, an “on the ground, looking up” kind of view. The way it is now, it looks like some kind of 2d video game background, with a weird tree sticking out the back.
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Step 7: I altered the entrances and the direction of the vines and suddenly the painting looks completely different! I’m finally pleased with the composition and I can concentrate solely on rendering the image. You might wonder why I didn’t try to finish this in the sketching stage, but for me, I just have to deal with everything as it comes to me. If I force myself to do it any other way, I’ll spend way too much time on it and it won’t even look good. Anyways, I’ve painted up some perspective strengthening tree-trunks on the sides which will eventually get some leaves. This will also help to frame the focal point, which is the entrance in the middle. I make sure to blur all details that I don’t want catching your attention while sharpening the details around the entrance.
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Step8: Finally finished! Other than painting in the remaining leaves and some birds I have done several color and focus-improving adjustments. When I feel I’m done with my image, I always try out Photoshop’s auto color/contrast/tone settings. Sometimes they completely destroy the image and are utterly useless, but now and then they bring something new into it. On this piece, Photoshop made all the shadows dark blue and half the image black. While that was quite useless in itself, duplicating it above the original image and blending them together made a vast improvement to the mood. I also added another color layer with some reds between the two entrances to contrast the blue shadows. Next, I used the gradient tool in its “sphere” setting and made a yellow/white light over the focal point which I then set to overlay. Doing this didn’t necessarily make the image more realistic or better, but it helped in drawing the viewers’ eyes towards the entrance. Then, on to my third most favorite tool in Photoshop: the “smart sharpen” filter. (Filters-> Sharpen-> Smart sharpen) You don’t know how blurry your painting is until you’ve slapped this one on it. Of course, I won’t use it on the entire painting, just around the focal point. This makes the edges sharper and the colors richer, drawing your eyes right to it. Lastly, flip the canvas horizontally to make sure it works both ways. If it doesn’t, something is bound to be off. Regardless, I always wait a day before calling it finished, as you might notice stuff later that you didn’t while painting.
Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
About the artist I am a 23-year-old illustrator living in Hamar, Norway, who just finished a bachelor in fine arts and computer science degree. Immediately after graduation I founded an art/web/3d/ programming/animation company with some of my friends called Sarepta Studio, where I work for clients all over the world. Contact: orjan.svendsen@sareptastudio.com Web: http://www.sareptastudio.com and http://www.svendsenart.com
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Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
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Autumn is my favorite season, especially in the fall. ! I love the crisp air, the uniqueness of September and October skies, hot cider and doughnuts waiting for us after a brisk walk or a romp in the leaves with our kids. So I really don’t want to rush the season... However, as we drink our cider and wine, and so we don’t get rushed later on, let’s get started on some of those portraits people want to give for Christmas. They’re called commissions – and that’s what we do. This is a mini tutorial for painting from a photo reference, using the Sargent brush, the oil pastel brush, and the grainy water blender in Painter. It assumes you know your way around the Painter software. Photo reference supplied by the client, slightly enhanced with Equalize in Painter. I was fortunate she gave me a pretty good photo with pose I could use. I used the default Artists Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
category Sargent brush to sketch on tracing
I used the oil pastel brush to lay in colors, brushing in some from the under photo (with clone button clicked). Mostly I selected colors from the color triangle and wheel, and applied with the oil pastel’s resat slider up to about 40. I just wanted to get some form with tones and values.
paper from a quick clone of the photo. This brush responds to hand pressure, which I like in a sketch. I kept the photo pale under the tracing paper (about 60%). Just enough showing that I could get the right placement of features without too much detail.
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I like to work on only the sketch at this point, keeping the reference photo in the upper left corner of my screen. That way I can see what to paint where. (If I get into trouble, there’s always the undo button and a quick toggle to show the photo under the tracing paper to redraw the mistake.) Next... I blended the pigments I’d just put in. I alternated adding more color with the resat at 30-40 and blending with the resat at zero. Over and over and over, until I had enough pigment where I wanted it.
Next, the hair… I still used the oil pastel, with the grain raised high enough the paper texture wouldn’t show to get plenty of pigment down. Then I messed it up with Marilyn Sholin’s messier brush, following the general direction of the hair. Back to the oil pastel at zero resat to brush it into place. Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
eyes at this point were too dark, so I redid them (see final shot), tweaked the nose, and added highlights to the lips. The last step was to equalize (Effects>Tonal Controls>Equalize) and sign it. Here is the final… Enjoy your season, and think ahead to doing some portraits for Christmas!
For the background I laid in colors complementary to the boy’s hair and eye coloring, and brushed in texture using the thick handmade paper (in Painter default papers) with a light hand on the Grainy Water blender brush. I also painted in the individual hairs with a small oil pastel brush. A lot more blending, then, on his face, ears and clothes. His 14
Readers’ Gallery
FOX
by R. Geary Hoffman GHPhotoart@me.com Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
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KOI
by R. Geary Hoffman GHPhotoart@me.com Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
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Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
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Color Select Your Fall Colors When working with color, Fall color or any other season’s color, it would be useful if we could alter a color without changing the subtleties of the brushwork, value, and saturation. Color Select allows a “noncontiguous pixel based” selection of a “range of color” based on hue, saturation and value. The terminology in this first paragraph may be foreign to some of you. Rather than give you a definition, let’s just play with the Color Select function and let the action explain. I am going to work with the following image and change the color of the bright red leaves to another color.
Of course I could select the leaves using the Lasso Selection Tool, and then fill the selection with a different color, but the resulting fill would be very flat and have only one value and saturation point for the whole selection. If I change the composite method for the layer I do see the underlying brushwork, but it looks more like a glaze, which isn’t what I am after.
Color Select will give me the results I am looking for. Let’s take a look at the Color Select Window. To open it, go to Select > Color Select.
The Color Select window contains, a Preview Window, 6 Slider Controls, an Invert Box, and a very important command “Click in image to set center color.” Notice that the preview window appears to be red. The bright red is Painter’s way of telling you what has been selected. To alter what is selected, first click in the image to set the center color.
Right Click Skip Allen
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This means take the cursor and click inside the document, not the preview window, and select the center color of the range of colors that you want.
The default setting for all the sliders is 100% with the exception of the H Extent, which is 20%. These are very high settings and give you a very wide range of color to be selected. If the sliders are left at their default the following selection is generated.
The selection includes all the orange, red, and yellow colors. To reduce the range, reduce the percentage of the H Extents, which reduces the range of hues selected.
After selecting the center color, part of the preview window is bright red indicating the areas that are selected; the grey green area is not selected. The selection can be refined by using the six slider controls. The H Extents, S Extents, and V Extents control the range of Hue, Saturation, and Value of the selection. The three Feather sliders control the softness of the edges of the selection.
With the H Extents reduced to 1%, the range of color selected has been reduced to just that bright red, but the range can be further refined by working with all three of the Extents. To make the color range a little broader, the H Extents was increased to 3%, the S Extents was decreased to 50% and the V Extents was reduced to 75%. Next add a layer and fill the Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
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selection with a new color. Now play with the composite method of the new layer or reduce its opacity.
As you can see, Color Select is a very powerful function of Painter. Any color could have been used to replace the bright reds and with the addition of composite methods or opacity changes, the color range can be changed in multiple ways. Take a look at the original and changed images again. As you compare the two images, notice the subtle variation of the hue, value, and saturation have been brought into the final image, which is the beauty of pixel based selections. Play a bit with color selection; I know you will love the technique.
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Autumn Collage - Recycle to Summer http: //cargocollective.com/victorlunnroc Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
Victor Lunn-Rockliffe 21
Marketing Buzz By Tim O’Neill
Ok, I have a pet peeve I am gonna vent about. Business Planning or lack thereof. Alright, maybe it’s not so much a pet peeve but rather a point of contention specific to most people who teach business planning. At least these folks believe there should be some planning and that gets some big props. But the challenge is if you don’t project, goal-set, dream and plan for specifics you may have a successful business regarding cash-flow and income but in reality that is a only a part of the whole picture. What if you end up working 80-100 weeks which is fairly common in many industries, especially in big dumb corporations? (actually in industries across the board a 75 hour work week is now the norm…I am guilty of this). Is that what you want? Is it your definition of success? That is what I mean because everyone has their own idea here of what success is to them. The point is if you don’t know what you want, specifically, you most likely will get down the road and find yourself unhappy. If you know exactly what you are trying to build, and more importantly why, it allows you to design patterns of success based on being extremely effective not just efficient. Efficiency is good but if the task we are so efficient at is not necessary to be effective towards our goal…it is still a waste. Right? This story I saw a few years back illustrates it perfectly, and I have seen this story around before but could not lay my hands on it. While I was reading Tim Ferris’s book, The Four Hour Work Week, he had this story profiled in his book. While I am still not sure where the original came from here is it excerpted from Tim’s book. An American businessman took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on doctor’s orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the first morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. A small boat with just one fisherman had docked, and inside the boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish. “How long did it take you to catch them?” the American asked. Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
Fables and Fortune Hunters “Only a little while,” the Mexican replied in surprisingly good English. “Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?” the American then asked. “I have enough to support my family and give a few to friends,” the Mexican said as he unloaded them into a basket. “But…What do you do with the rest of your time?” The Mexican looked up and smiled. “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Julia, and stroll into the village each evening, where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life senor.” The American laughed and stood tall. “Sir, I am a Harvard M.B.A. and I can help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat. In no time, you could buy several boats with the increased haul. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing
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boats.” He continued, “Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village, of course, and move to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, and eventually New York City, where you could run your expanding enterprise with proper management.’ The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, senor, how long will all this take?” To which the American replied, “15-20 years. 25 tops.” “But what then, senor?” The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would
Digital Paint Magazine - October 2010
announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.” “Millions, senor? Then what?” “Then you would retire and move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with you wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos…..” Ah, the arrogance of us sometimes. It brings out a specific point though and that is starting with the end in mind. I have a podcast that I originally put on my artmarketingbuzz.com site, it is addressed to artist but conceptually it applies no matter what your profession or business niche. So what does all this have to do with social marketing, attraction marketing, social media marketing, or personal development or selling your art? Everything. If you don’t spend the time defining the “why” of putting your business together it
won’t work. What if you get down the road and find out you would be happier doing something other than what you are trying to achieve now? What if you really want to work 2 days and just hang with your family the remaining time? Most of us plan and goal set according to previously defined social mores. Why? I think because we don’t spend the up-front time to really define what “our” perfect life would look like. I am guilty of this also…. bigtime. So the whole point here is to take stock of the blessings you currently have. If you are in a job or you have your own business check yourself and see if you are running the business or if the business is running you. After you check, make adjustments, continue down the path, making minor tweaks to keep you heading true North specific to your dreams and goals. 23