Tags
Bird, layers, paint, sketch, Sparrowhawk
Early attempts at bird painting -
SparrowHawk
This old effort was actually unfinished and left “as is” because I actually liked the result without full completion. It said all I wanted to say, showed the bird with a hint of impressionist without actually being so.
Managed as one would tackle a “real” picture it was slowly built up from a basic pencil layer, the colors added from a flattened version of the original image, piece by piece using “ghost” brushes and a clone technique.
Beginnings
The bird then is basically “painted” on top of the pencil outlining and directly on to a canvas background layer. Note the background is not built up using layers of paint as a first process then with the subject added, but in reverse. The subject is managed first, then the background built up around it.
This is a software technique I still use, although not one that true computer virtual artists would probably employ at all, but one which an old artist such as myself finds is quite natural – clunky maybe in this modern graphics orientated world, but very satisfying and very creative, which is of course the driving factor in all my images.
Early bird
So what of the original? Was it a photograph or a sketch or a painting? In essence it’s quite immaterial – it is what it is now, altered, enhanced, reborn, manipulated, cloned, imagined – painted. . . .
Whatever – it’s new, original and there isn’t another one like it – anywhere.
And as to the top image being just a computer creation – well not quite – as it hangs in my office today, unfinished as it is and size wise some 21″ x 13″ and nicely framed. Whilst not watercolor or oil painted it is instead managed in a very long lived ink medium, a pigment ink in fact which is applied in multilayer thicknesses showing the depth and intensity of the brushwork.
A work of art perhaps.
I’ve been looking quickly through some of your other posts and am intrigued by what you are making, using the computer. Although I have looked at some other people’s computer art it always seems to be very impersonal, “clunky” or lacking somehow in signs of the hand of the artist….maybe this is what I can see in your pictures, your hand. I like the robin at the top of the page too, he looks as if he’s been drawn with fine lines of pastel! The post called
Many thanks for your comment. Being an old artist but unable now to physically manage it, I try to express my creative art in the fashion
I would once have done using the only medium open to me – the computer. Even this sometimes is not possible on bad days, but yes you can say
that the “hand” of the artist is in everything I manage to do and the fact that you can see that hand creativity is very gratifying.
Many thanks for viewing.
Note – The pages “Explanations” and “Influences” at the top of the blog tends to say what my stuff is about.