Color Match

This painting I did not use the clone tool in Painter. However Creating paintings from other digital pictures is great because you can match exact color with the dropper tool, similar to the same tool in Photoshop. So this image was hand painted from scratch on my Wacom Tablet. I think I am going to decorate my new bedroom with this color scheme, I love the fresh green color with the dark dark navy blue. Kids are back in school today so hopefully I can do some more pieces, I'm also upgrading the ram on my computer to process files better, I've been having issues. 

Swans

This painting started as a photograph my father took. He watches the swans all winter in Jackson Hole Wyoming and Southern Idaho. 

Poppies

This is one of my favorites. The piece originated from a picture I took from the side of the road on Vancouver Island BC. For this painting I used the Van Gogh brush.  The original photo is available for use on istockphoto

Front Porch

Last summer I had the opportunity to work with one of my photo clients to create a digital painting of her children. After a couple photo shoots and some major swapping of heads, feet, plants, and children (in photoshop) I came up with the following composition. When you make as many swaps as I did in you have a lot of seams but when creating a painting in Painter you manipulate every pixel in the image, your seams are gone.  In Photoshop there are filters you can apply over the whole image that gives it a painterly effect but you have very limited control. Some day I'll do a quick video presentation on the process and post it on the blog. This painting is 30x40, very big, the biggest piece I have ever done. I think it turned out nice, I was very pleased. Another bonus with digital paintings is that you can print as many as you want and the size can change too. I did however work on a file 30x40, this takes up a lot of space on the hard drive.

Lavender Farm

This image I used the water color tools on Corel Painter. This building is the gift shop for a lavender farm on the San Juan Island. If we would have been there a couple weeks later the fields would have been in full bloom.  I am always on the hunt for poppy fields and lavender farms. There is a lavender farm here in Northern Virginia but when I approached the owners about doing some photography there they said no. The hunt continues. 

Magnolia

Bride

Merry-go-round

This is a piece I did of my daughter, it is currently hanging above our fireplace mantel. The original doesn't have this black frame on it, all the piece on this blog will have faux frames, (the frames don't exist). This pieces is printed on canvas and stretched over stretcher bars. I painted it for her bedroom but it is the only art piece I have that fits the space over my fireplace for right now. Again the piece is done with Corel Painter.

Introduction to Painter

In 2005 a friend of mine came to my house with the most beautiful pictures of her daughter. I could tell the picture was not straight from the camera and I knew it wasn't photoshopped but I had no idea what she had done.  It was then that she introduced me to Corel Painter. After a crash course she had me hooked and I quickly bought my Corel Painter program along with my Wacom Tablet (A must for digital artists). This was my first picture I did in Painter. You can see from the original picture what an incredible difference. I love Painter because you can take an ordinary picture and turn it into something unique.

Girl With Flowers

This was my first digital painting done in photoshop using the art history tool. Photoshop is somewhat limiting in what you can do but it worked well for this piece.