The other day I mentioned I bought Corel Painter 2019 at a good discount and was looking for a graphics tablet to replace my Wacom Bamboo, which had too small a screen for even a 640x480 painting. It took a while, but I picked up an XP-Pen tablet big enough to work on. Between waiting on that to be back in stock and since getting it, I've been watching digital art videos and drawing videos to refresh myself on anything I've forgotten since I painted more regularly and to better understand drawing.
I've been drawing circles and heads and stuff. My drawing skills have never been great. I can do limited things. I had to drive with someone to drop off a car at a mechanic one time after hours. To go with the note about the symptoms, I drew a rough picture of the part that needed looking at and the parts around it. It was very rough, but later, when I took the person back to pick up the car, the mechanic was interested in the drawing and said he found the part right away. It wasn't a great drawing at all but good enough for that situation. For doing cover art, I don't have the polished skills I need yet. I'm looking at drawing 1,000 circles, 1,000 heads, 1,000 figures, etc. Twenty a day until I learn how to do it right. I haven't started that yet, just a little.
Now that I have Painter and a tablet, I've been trying to learn how Painter works. During my search for a digital art program, I kept seeing comments that Painter was hard to learn. Yes. Yes, it is. I'm still trying to figure out how the brushes function and how to do things like layers and masking. This is a crude drawing/painting I did to try to learn how to do some things. It's not a finished piece of art. The shadows are wrong, and other things are wrong. But it's part of learning how to make the program work. This could be something that would go in a background and not be too detailed to distract from the real focal point.
What I was working on before this footlocker(using the gradient tool) wasn't working the way I needed it to. I decided to do a simple box that would look amazing. I ended up running out of time to work on it. The colors are Burnt Umber, Titanium White. Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Yellow Light(?), Cadmium Orange and the closest green Painter offered me to Hooker's Green or Forest Green. I forget their name for it, but it looked about the same. There might be a few other colors picked up accidentally from having a dirty palette. There was one drop of purple at least. Why don't they have Dioxazene Purple?
Painter has several ways to make squares. I couldn't get the two main ones to work, even after looking up the help file of one of them, the Select tool. It worked as far as it would make a great rectangle, but the white dotted line wouldn't go away after I finished using the tool and moved on to a brush. There was no unselect option for it. I tried everything I could think of inside the program and the help file. I ran out of time. I'll have to find a video on it. The way I got the box to look almost accurate was to activate a grid and trace over the lines and measure out the offset lines. It more or less worked. I used a real life ruler for some of it and ran the stylus along that.
The other part of this learning exercise was figuring out brushes. I used three main ones: a glazing brush, an opaque brush and a detail brush. I tried one or two others, but they didn't really work for this. The brushes work a bit differently at different sizes. Changing sizes and experimenting was part of the process. A lot of the brushes have different names but seem to do the same thing, make a blurry line. Remember that other blog where I mentioned that so much digital art has that bad, fake look to it. The airbrush look is a factor in a lot of that. A lot of Painter's brushes seem to be the airbrush with a different name. They sell scores and scores of other brushes as add-ons, but they're very expensive. I'll probably end up buying maybe one pack, if I find one that I need. Otherwise, my plan is to make my own based on my own needs. In real life I use four types of brushes in about half a dozen sizes. It's not many at all. A hake brush, a few bristles, a sable or two and a liner brush. I have palette knives, but I've never gotten into them. I need to. I want to in Painter. A sub-goal is to stick with a limited number of brushes but learn how to use all the effects. The effects and tools are the real things to learn. I think that will simplify my efforts.
Overall it was a very time-consuming effort for very little result. But it's progress in learning how the program works. Why a box? Mostly because I thought it would be easy to get something that looked good. I was so wrong. But also because everything in life can be broken down into simpler shapes like circles, squares and triangles. Arms and legs can be roughed in with cylinders, which are rectangles with ellipses(form of a circle) at the ends. Heads are more or less circles. And so forth. One of my concept ideas for the cover for AoE is a cityscape. This footlooker helps me get a feel for doing buildings later, if I go that direction. I'm also thinking about a street scene.
I was hoping I could get up to speed and running in a month or so. I'm not sure how long it's going to take now. Learning Painter is a huge task. Off topic, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro is a free download now. I got that, too, and dabbled with it. It's interesting and easy to use. Anyway, no matter how hard it is transferring my real life experience to digital form and getting up to speed is, it will have great advantage. I'll be able to Undo things and Zoom the canvas in to work on details. I can tweak and tweak and tweak a work until it has the look I want. If I'd had more time for the footlocker and my goal had been to make it a real art piece, I could have applied textures and highlights and scratches and worked the shadows, etc., until it had the right look. I can't zoom in a real painting or tweak it to death without overworking it.
This is a long blog this week, but this is what I'm doing and what I'm up against. A lot of things I simply don't know how to do in traditional art. I'm also going to have to learn how to do those things and do them in digital form. The silver lining in all this is that not only will I be able to make my own book covers, I'll be able to do them for other people for money.
Have a great weekend.
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