UPDATE **ADOBE HAS RETIRED THIS TOOL** You now have to use the web based color wheel. Do you ever look at a painting or piece of art and think, “wow, those colors really seem to fit!” and wonder why? Most of us are familiar with complimentary colors and have…
The last couple of days I have been working on yet another technique, but this one requires much more painting skills. I did use mixer brushes, but for the most part, I painted the image from a reference file and generally just painted! As you can see from the reference…
Painting with the mixer brush, or any digital painting, has one disadvantage if you are going for a photo-realistic effect; the painting smudges and softens the pixels. The entire process is counter intuitive to keeping things sharp. I think this is one of the reason why many of the current…
In this blog I’m going to provide a step by step review of my latest digital painting in Photoshop. I’ve been exploring different techniques lately and combine both Photoshop techniques with curves and adjustment with mixer brush painting to get the final photo realistic yet painterly effect that I’m looking…
Back in 2011 we took a cruise out of Venice Italy down the coast of Croatia and around the boot and back to Rome. We stopped at Split, Dubrovnik, Malta, Taormina Sicily, then to Florence, Monaco, Nice and a small medieval village called Eze in France. This image is a…
This art piece is a digital painting from an original image I captured in the spring in Castroville, Texas at a location we call the “Poppy House”. Every year the owner opens his yard to photographers and guest to come take photos of his beautiful poppies. A small donation is…
The next composite in my wildlife series is a couple of black crowned cranes. The black crowned crane makes it home in the savannah area of sub-Saharan Africa, from Sudan and Ethiopia in the east, over to the west coast including Senegal and Gambia. It lives in shallow wetlands and…
Continuing with my wildlife series, I decided to create a portrait of a llama image that I captured during one of my wildflower shoots last spring up near Burnet, Texas. I often travel for 6 or more hours in the spring driving through the back roads looking for fields of…
Yesterday I added a post about painting with an impasto effect while building a new piece of artwork. Today’s challenge was to see if I could take a painting I already completed and ADD the impasto brush strokes on top. This would require me to find a way to build…
As a digital painter, I wanted to find a way to make the brush stroke look real. When you paint with oil or acrylic and you really load the brush with paint, you get the 3D effect of the thick paint on the canvas. Trying to recreate that effect in…