Devilry, Me, and Sunset Suicide

Before I launch into the nonsense, I just want to encourage you to go to the deviantart links for these pictures if you like them. There are two reasons. First, for the photomanipulations, I would like you to look at the credits for the sources, and second, you will bet a much better quality view of the artwork if you look at the devart links. Thanks.

Devil's Lament on a Bad Hair Day

http://www.deviantart.com/view/13656892/

This one was pure whimsy. I wanted something I could knock off fast after having a disaster losing a painting I was working on before when Corel crashed. I do kind of like this painting. I like the lips. Also I am beginning to figure out how to paint hair. The hair is not brilliant, but it is better than any I have done previously. It is purely digital painting in Corel. No references.

Self Portrait in Stardust and Rust

http://www.deviantart.com/view/13716168/

This is a photomanipulation with painting on top. I combined a couple photos of rust by a photographer that calls herself bigmammajen on deviantart. Go look at them by following the links at the devart link above. The rust photos are beautiful in and of themselves. I combined them with that photo of star creation that people call the pillars of creation. I did lots of mucking with layer masks to overlap the images in various ways. Then I painted a bit on top of it to emphasize various things. On the whole, I like it.

Infinite Sunset Suicide Regression

http://www.deviantart.com/view/13778214/

I really like this one. I built the sunset landscape in Bryce, a 3d rendering tool. That was pretty easy, since I just used its pretty basic built-in settings. Still I really like the way it looks. Then I took a 2d picture by deviouselite-stock at deviantart. I mucked around in Bryce to replicate, rotate, and lower her photo to get the image of hundreds marching into the sea at sunset. The only real hard part was finding the right settings in Bryce to render the 2-d picture properly in the environment. Maybe it should be easy, but I don't really know how to use Bryce yet. The whole thing was fairly easy though, and perhaps that makes it somewhat worthless, but I really like the way it looks.

I will likely do a variation on this theme with an actual 3-d model rather than a 2-d photo, and I will likely build a more complex Bryce environment. I may do one showing marching *out* of the sea, an infinite rebirth regression or something...

Me, Rorschach, and a Disembodied Hand Model.

Me and Rorschach

This is another picture I am working on. It is still in progress. As much as I love blogger.com, thier full resolution views suck so I am linking again to the full view at deviantart.com.

You should check out the full view if only to see the fucking brilliance of Corel's capability in showing brushwork texture. It truly is amazing! I don't care to work with the watercolor level, because many of the brushes are godawful slow. They totally destroy the rythm of painting, but I put up with it, because it shows the brush work so well.

Anyway, this is not done yet. I will update it, of course, when it is. It is christmas eve. The wife is off visiting her mother, and I am painting, drinkin, and smoking. It would be cool if they logged in and left me a comment. We shall see, but, of course, it isn't very likely.

The final version of NIght Djinni.

Final Version

Here is the last modification I intend to do with Night Djinni. There are still a lot of things wrong with this painting but I think I have learned what I want to with it and rather than obsess, I want to move on to learn more. I want to say that I am pretty happy with it on the whole, and I can't wait to get a good-quality 8-ink printer to print it out and see how it looks.

But today I was musing on where I want to go with digital painting. It is just too easy to produce prurient wonders. See this link: Things not to do.

Ok, don't get me wrong. I am a guy, and I like naked chicks as much as the next guy, or at least as much as the next guy whose wife might be reading his blog. And I am not trying to diss the photoshop skills of the person in the link above. This person currently has more skills than I do. But my point is, if you browse the site on the link above, you will see (presuming you do not get, err, distracted) that there are a billion people on the planet who know how to melt beautiful women to make them yew know lookallwierdandshit....

I am not going to even say it isn't art. It is art. And some of these people are very good. But the point is, what value would I add to do one more distorted breast fest? It seems to me one must strive to have some individual style (not easy--or even possible in the strictest sense). But again, check out jrulier at deviantart.com. Hey, even he is clearly somewhat derivative of H.R Giger and his army of emulators. But even saying that, jrulier seems to have an indibidual voice in the world of 3d image manipulation. Ok, so maybe he is one in 10 million rather than one in a million. Very few are truly unique and maybe nobody is, but his vision is different enough to stand out for me. There is a real beauty in his distortions, whereas Giger and his wannabes seem to me to be striving for the ugly. Hey, I am not criticising. I love Giger in most of his perversions, but jrulier's work seems at least somewhat different, and I am inspired by it in ways I am not by random melted naked chick...

Night Djinni

Ok, here is a bit of discussion of a work in progress. FIrst of all, as I said, this is a work in progress, so it is not finished yet. Also, this site does not seem to show the pieces in their full resolution, so here is the link to the full view at deviantart.com: Night Djinni.

Credit where due, here is the photo that inspired the work: Inspiration.

I liked the erotic simplicity of the source photo. I am working on an ink drawing of it as well, but I wanted to paint it. At first I intended to do a charcoal study of it, but after fighting with that I remembered suddenly that I hate working with charcoal. About that time I started to become aware of the power of Corel and Photoshop, so I decided to devote my efforts to learning to paint with those tools.

I started the painting from the following sketch that I scanned in and loaded into Corel:

Sketch for Night Djinni

I am spent the last two weekends trying to paint this and getting nowhere. The problem is that while I have developed a modest comtetence in drawing the human form, I don't knwow shit about painting. I have always wanted to paint, but the mess and hassle always prevent me from spending time at it. But I am good at sitting in front of a computer. I design the bloody things for a living, first for Hewlett Packard and now for Intel. So sitting in front of a computer I can do. The problem is that just putting in the time is not good enough. You have to study right in order to learn, and I do not have models and lighting systems to do provide me with the models to paint from.

Heidi's photo is great, but I wanted color, and I just do not have the instinct to make it up. I *can* draw bodies with no model, but that is only after years of drawing from people and studying anatomy. I do not have that experienct to draw on with painting.

But then I realized: technology is fantastic! I don't need human models. I have daz3d on my computer, and I can build a 3d model and light it with the colors I want and add that to the reference photo for color and light cues. God I love computers! Here is the model I built from Victorai 3 in daz3d. I used it only for color references and to see how the light falls on forms when lit int he ways I wanted it to be:

L3d Light Model for Night Djinni

Using the source phote, my sketch and the lighting reference, I did the following:

Night Djinni

Is it cheating?

Painting of Jessie 1

Before I dive into some exposition, here is a link to the woman who provided the stock photo:

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/12257168/

On with the holding forth.

This painting along with the previous one were both created with the same technique. I broke down and bought a copy of Corel Painter IX, because, well because it is effing AWESOME. I looked at their tutorial videos and picked up on this way to use cloning techniques to grab colors from the reference photo as I paint the picture. I need practice getting the results I want, but this technique will without doubt be highly valuable to me in producing works that I like. Over at deviant art *Painting or Jessie 2* got way more viewings in a couple hours than any of my harder works did in months. So I think maybe other people like this as well.

It is strange though. In many ways it is cheating. I *can* draw these pictures, but with this method I do not really need to. It is hard to explain what I mean, but even though you do not draw the picture when painting it this way, the process of having Corel pick the color your brush uses from the source photo effectively does draw the picture as you paint. The process definitely influences the outcome. There are a lot of artistic decisions made by me in these pictures, but the overall process still *feels* like cheating.

But this brings up a philosophy of art question. Is it only art if you spend years learning how to manipulate actual oil paints? Or is the art in the composition, and the decisions about how to form the image? For me the art is the idea, and focusing on the craft is to some degree bullshit. Don't get me wrong. The craft deserves immense respect, especially for those brilliant men and women who pioneered all this without all these ginchy tools to make it easier. But I find working with Corel both fun and fulfilling, so if I were to generate great images using it, will they have less merit than if I spend the next ten years struggling with natural media so that I could produce even *one* of them? I, personally, think not, but it still feels like cheating.

Jessie 2

Painting of Jessie 2

This painting used a stock photo provided by Jessie. Here is a link: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/12271834/

Wacom and Corel

CorelBoy

Hey, this is not a brilliant finished work of art or anything, but it is the work of about a half an hour screwing around with a Wacom graphics tablet and Corel Painter elements. I am totally smitten. This tool is fucking brilliant. I am not a color or a painting genius, but this is easily the coolest color paintint I have ever done just screwing around with these tools. Good God I love technology!

Thinking Digital

Moon Djinni 2 Colored

Yeah, I am still working on the Kiera drawing. But I was hanging out over at deviantart.com and saw all the really cool stuff people were doing digitally, so I decided to experiment with paint shop pro. The results are still very amateurish, but I am intrigued by the possibilities. I never had much interest in the idea of digital art, because I do not like being tied to a computer to draw, and have never felt that sketching the human body would be very fun with a mouse. But I realized something that ought to have been obvious. I can do the sketching in real life and color it digitally.

I would, in many ways,rather do the coloring with watercolor or oils, but my real problem is that I just never get past the hassle of preparation and the many many hours it would take just to learn how to use the media. I always *intend* to, but my laziness and lack of attention span means it never happens. I suspect it never will.

But I realized looking at deviantart.com that digitally coloring really does largely get past my issues with preparation, cleaning, and duration of work span. There *is* no prep or cleaning and I can come and go as I please. With watercolor, if you mess up on a large piece that is almost finished you are pretty much fucked. It is not very forgiving. Digital is. Yes, I will never be able to get those beautiful affects one can get with watercolor, but I probably never would have done that anyway.

I still do intend to learn to paint with real media as well, but right now I am really interested in what can be done digitally. I am thinking of picking up a Wacom graphics tablet to increase the flexibility of my exploration.

This painting, as I said, is pretty inept, but I am encouraged by the possibilities.