My First Foray into the World of Digital Painting

So in the last few months I decided to embrace some of my very few talents. As of lately I've taken up painting again. I'll post the two I have done in a later post but more recently again I've also decided to enter the realm of Digital Painting. I had always been daunted by this medium as there is such lavishly detailed pictures floating around the net, each with unique, colourful and wonderful styles that I felt I could never achieve such a sense of detail and awe so many of them inspire. That and I only have a meagre mouse instead of a tablet.

But I decided against my pessimism and pushed forward to give it a try! After a few brief tutorials on colour theory and which software proved popular for this sort of endeavour I picked out an old picture I drew in my transition year of secondary school:

-Transition Year Drawing

So with Photoshop in tow, I began to colour in the drawing, using all the techniques I had obtained from previous tutorials. In the beginning I wasn't very pleased with the early results. Without the drawing overlaid, the colours underneath had very little shape or form, appeared blunt and didn't have any sense of the detail the drawing did.

- Phase 1: The nearly giving up phase.

Around this time is usually where my old self would have given up. I don't know where I developed it but over the years I had a bad habit of expecting immediate results and submitting to defeat too easily. And I nearly did here too. But I pressed on. And on, and on. And then something wonderful happened. I was learning to use tools of the program outside of the tutorials, I was losing track of time and most of all I was enjoying it. And when you spend enough time doing the things you enjoy it becomes a labour of love with results that could possibly exceed what you initially planned. Such was my luck in this case. I learnt the virtue of patience all over again and it was paying off:

- Phase 2: Wait, what? This is sort of cool!

At this stage I was enormously pleased with myself. I was liking the look more than the original drawing and I had learnt vast amounts about digital painting. All because I actually had patience and took the time to do it. The funny thing is that, apart from having to draw the subject at hand, the colouring part is not that difficult once you get the theory down and have a bit of knowhow about light and shadow. And even in those regards I'm a beginner at best. But with Photoshop you have all the tools you could need to perfect and fine tune things right down to a small shadow, coarse skin or whatever effect you're trying to achieve. It just takes patience and time!

In the end the final product didn't stick exactly to the original picture plan. I altered the background slightly as I DID spend probably around 6-8 hours colour the picture over the course of time. I felt that I could do a quick fix for the background. But funnily enough the background which honestly took about 15-20 mins max ended up blending well with the picture. I feel like I should take credit for achieving the look of it, but honestly it was literally down to another thing I learnt with my first digital painting. Experimentation. By pure blind luck of testing the use of a few tools of Photoshop I stumbled across a background that is simply but compliments the "Water Dragon" I had created. The end result was this:

- Final Digital Painting "Water Dragon"

Simple background, all from messing about. Mind you that won't always provide results, but now I know how to get THAT result if I ever intend to use it again! In the end I think I can say I pulled off a good first digital painting. Of course, I wanted to show it off and have since been recommended to get  a tablet for drawing, which I do believe could greatly improve the time I spend on each one. Overall though the sense of achievement was something I haven't felt in a while and I hope this is the first of many I plan to post in the future.

So to close, for anyone who is intimidated about learning to digital paint, don't be. Like all things it takes time but you'll be surprised about how quick you can adapt. Get Photoshop or Corel, scan in your images and starting painting, you'll enjoy it, you'll get really pissed off and you'll be proud!

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And here's a little sneak peak of the next one for anyone interested. It's based off a character called Vin from a book called the Mistborn trilogy. You may have to look her up to get the context of the picture but I'm hoping it will look cool none the less in the end, even for those who have no idea what the hell is going on in the picture:

Sleeping Beauty and her Morbid Kingdom

My body's general disdain for me left me in a restless slumber last night. So in a race to fall asleep with myself I decided the best option was to find a classic Disney film to help me conk. Much to my dismay, this did not work.

The movie in question was Sleeping Beauty, surely a film about a woman going for a lengthy (albiet death inducing) nap would help drag a curtain over these eyes. Alas, instead I became enveloped in the film as I questioned the motives of the characters and plot for the 1 hour 15 minute runtime. For example, Maleficent, she's the villain of the film but I think she takes things a little over the top from the get go. I mean, she throws a hissy fit about not being invited to the christening of Princess Aurora. If this makes her angry, clearly she cares to a certain extent about what people think of her. So what does she go ahead and do? She puts a death inducing curse on the 1 year old child that will kill her at the age of 16, by touching an evil green spindle wheel. This is over not being invited. To a christening.

There must be no Sky Plus in her castle.

"Damn it! I missed Independence Day... AGAIN!"

Second of all, the King and Queen both do not care about their daughter nor have any quality talents themselves. They let the fairies morph the child's face with the gift of beauty and then tack on a bit of X-factor to her with the gift of song. The only really meaningful thing the fairies give is that she doesn't die from bad ass bitch Maleficent's curse. THEN when all said and done, they just give their child away for 16 years in a brief moment of not-my-problem-anymoreness. Why the fairies so blatantly ignore these unlikeable traits is beyond me. Anyways, they celebrate by burning a load of spindle wheels while stupidly overlooking the fact that both Maleficent and the three Fairies can summon things into existence at the wave of their wands. A kingdom of fools run by fools I tells ya!

"They should totally let this guy run the kingdom"

So for 16 years the fairies decide that the best way to protect Aurora from nothing is by dumping her in the middle of the forest and not using any magic at all. All of this is completely unnecessary because the curse doesn't actually have any effect until the moment she turns 16, and even then she'll still have to touch a spindle wheel for it to actually work. All they would have to do is make sure she doesn't go a little overboard on her super sweet princess 16th.

So yeah, whatever about being raised in the wild and being brought back to the castle once she was 16 . Just a bit of babysitting seemed to be the best remedy to the curse. However, in a wonderfully retarded tragic turn in events, they leave Aurora alone for no more than 5 mins before she goes ahead and curses the shit out of herself. Maleficent laughs, the fairies cry and decide that no one should figure out about their monumental failure that they had 16 years to prepare for.

So the fairies unintentionally take a page from Maleficent's book and put everyone into a deep slumber until Aurora is to be awoken again. Clearly these fairies never took a biology class. They did this under the belief that this period of slumber may be ever lasting. Ever lasting also means a whole lot of not eating for an entire kingdom.

"Well, at least they'd all be able to wear skinny jeans"

Luckily the kingdoms one hope, Prince Philip, happened to be gallivanting off in the forest with his unnaturally intelligent horse. He just happens to be in love with Aurora, for reasons beyond me as they only met once in the forest and even before that he only saw her as a 1 year old child in a crib when he was something along the age of 6 or 7. This also leads me to believe he's a pedophile. Anyways, Maleficent's steals him and locks her in her totally awesome castle of doom that would give Sauron a run for his money as evil overlord. Insert fairies here and large rescue scene to escape.

Now. Maleficent has clearly shown she is both powerful and quite evil. I do not know what her intentions really are, but usually people living in this mindset demand obedience and loyalty at inhumane expectations. In a heartfelt rage of the entire situation she turns her entire kingdom into a thorny inconvenient garden to hinder our young pedo-prince in his race to Aurora's aid. I guess you could say, she went a little.. Hay-BRIAR! And then she turns into a dragon and fights the prince with "All the powers of Hell!" as quoted. I don't know about you, but if I could turn into a friggin' DRAGON I'd be doing a lot more than sitting around and waiting for a curse to happen in 16 years.

Anyways, as it turns out, the powers of Hell are no match against Prince Philip's Olympic javelin skills. Sword, meet heart. Maleficent has an allergic reaction to this and disappears entirely, leaving behind her clothes. Then our horny prince proceeds to the top of the castle to take advantage of the sleeping 16 year old and ate the face off her.

"oh baby... the things I'm gonna do to you"

Maybe I was looking into the movie a bit much, but I leave you with a recommendation that this movie will most likely not help you sleep. Good night!