Category: Touchart (page 3 of 5)

It was a beautiful day today and the cherry trees are in full bloom. I sat out in the backyard and sketched this in about 20 minutes.
 
I tried two new things. First of all I made a paper texture in Photoshop using a combination of the Messotint and Grain filters. You can see a little of the original texture at the base of the tree. I then used a large transparent brush to paint in the the rich blue sky.
 
The other thing I tried was to paint without my glasses on. I’m extremely nearsighted. I attempted to paint what I saw in order to achieve an impressionistic rendering. At the very end I put my glasses back on to add a little detail. This “trick” really worked. It helped me ignore the details and see the whole. I became much more aware of colors and values and basic shapes.

This started as a scribbling texture test that turned into the sky above the mountains and evolved from there. Reminds me of the high mountain lakes of the Cascades. I really like the way the sky turned out and the colors in the lake.

This one was more of a construction than a drawing. I have a hard time making a clean black line in Brushes. Usually I get a ragged line that’s 2 or 3 pixels wide and I have to undo or go in with white and attempt to clean up the line. Very laborious! It was a good lesson.
 
I did the layout in Photoshop. I scanned the Touch on a flatbed scanner and used that image for the outermost iPod. I also photographed my hand holding the iPod and I pasted that image onto the screen of each iPod rotating it a bit to the left each time. There are actually 10 levels of iPods in the reference photo. In Brushes I was only able to draw 6 levels. The limiting factor was the wide of the line. I used the same (smallest) line width throughout the drawing.
 
The idea came to me while drawing the Hand X-Ray. Initially I was going to call it “Refrigerator Art” and use the line drawing on the screen of the iPod and photograph it hanging on the refrigerator. But after experimenting with it, I found I preferred the line drawing by itself.

This is a “gag” drawing. I wanted to hold the iPod in my left hand and make it look like it was taking an x-ray. (See below). I used Google image search to find several hand x-rays which I used to learn what x-rays looked like. Bones are denser on the edges. I then drew the hand outline to line up with my hand as I held the iPod and filled in the bones looking at the reference photos for ideas about detail and shading. Later I discovered that several people had written X-Ray apps for the iPhone/Touch. So, the idea was not unique.

This is my second try at sketching on location. I drew this in late afternoon in about 20 minutes. I tried letting color define the shape. Instead of drawing the shapes first and then filling in with color, I looked at and then painted in the local color. The overlapping colors then defined the shapes. This worked well in the lower part of the stems and in the flowers themselves.
 
Here’s a comparison shot of the sketch and the subject.

I’m just experimenting with line weight. Brushes has 3 different brushes and I wanted to compare the smallest setting of each brush to see if they looked different. I think brush #2 gives a slightly finer line.
 
When you save the large version as a tiff in Brushes Viewer, you lose some contrast. So, I increased the contrast a bit in Photoshop using Curves.

This is my first attempt at doing a 10 minute sketch on location. It’s pretty primitive, but it does capture the idea of the scene. I was trying to get the basic shapes, colors and tonalities. What caught my eye were the interesting shadows of the limbs cast on the lawn and the daffodils. I had two difficulties – keeping an eye on the time and seeing the iPod’s screen in the bright sunlight. Next time I think I’ll set an alarm on my watch so I won’t have to keep checking the time.
 
I discovered something surprising. There’s a lot of detail in the blown up image done in Brushes Viewer. Look at the daffodils for instance. I found I could use this large image to experiment with various cropped versions of the scene.
 
Here’s a version of the same tree done with Oil Canvas, another paint program for the iPhone/Touch. You start with a photo and use different sized brushes to ‘paint’ the image by drawing color from the photo.

I made the soup. My wife made the bowl.

This is an experiment to see if I can post directly from my iPod Touch. Looks like it worked. I first save from Brushes to my Saved Photos. Then I email the photo to Posterous.

This painting took me 2 or 3 hours to complete over a couple of days. I worked by looking at a reference photo on my MacBook while painting on the Touch.

It’s difficult to draw straight lines in Brushes on the Touch. I thought doing a Mondrian would test my skills. I researched several Mondrian paintings on the internet to see which colors he typically used. Believe it or not I started out the painting with a black background. I then blocked in the colors leaving a ragged black line between them and then, using a small, clear ruler I drew in thicker black lines over the ragged ones. I had to do a bit of touch up in the corners of the colors. If you look closely, you can see I left some imperfections in the lines. Also, I discovered that when you paint large sections of color, you have to go over the area several times in order to achieve a smooth, even color. If you don’t, you can see the brush strokes. Look closely and you’ll see some blotches.