Speed Painting II - Page 6

Chruser · Posted 2005-07-14, 09:51 PM in reply to Chruser's post starting "Schtuff. ..."

OH GOD

It's just like my dream!

I need to buy 1500 feet of extension cable and a small radio wave transmitter.

Chruser · Posted 2005-07-15, 12:19 PM in reply to Chruser's post starting "Schtuff. ..."

That's some awesome drawing stuff

Chruser · 09:12 PM

Digital is bad. Traditional is good. Rinse and repeat.

Chruser

My new wallpaper.

Kaneda

That does look pretty fuckin sweet.

JRwakebord

Can I just ask which program(s) is being used to create these speed paintings?

Lenny

Thanks guys. As for the programs used, I started with an initial sketch using PaintChat (a free Java application, which kind of resembles something between MS Paint and Adobe Photoshop), and finished it off a bit more in Photoshop. I'm happy with any application that comes with opacity-setting brushes and good color pickers.

Some kind of digital tablet is not necessary, but it's nice to have. The Wacom Intuos series are great if you can afford them. The tablets don't truly give you the feel of a real pen/pencil, but it's pretty close.

My personal favourite applications for digital painting are:

Adobe Photoshop

Photoshop has a very nice brush system (easy to make custom brushes if you want to), and it has a great feel to painting in it. The differences between Photoshop CS2 and the former Photoshop CS are insignificant for anyone who uses the software for drawing/painting applications. I do believe CS2 has some kind of perspective guide tool, but I haven't tried it yet.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/main.html
Corel Painter IX

The latest version of Painter comes with a large selection of brushes intended to simulate traditional painting. The program can emulate traditional tools fairly well, but it's far from perfect. However, the sheer quantity of tools, many of which are extremely good, makes the program very interesting, and can be used really well in conjunction with Photoshop. Even if you're normally not into (digital) art, go ahead and download the 30-day, full-functionality trial of the program. It might very well get you interested in the field of art, or at least give you a fun time trying out lots of different art mediums without creating a mess of oil stains.

http://www.corel.com/painterix/home/
PaintChat

PaintChat is a free Java-based drawing/painting application, which can pretty much be used on all computers with any graphical interface OS. While it is one of the most powerful pure-bred art applications, it also comes with the very neat possibility of partaking in simultaneous multi-user sessions who share one large canvas. It is, unfortunately, not very easy to run without some basic knowledge of Java applets. Some knowledge of the Japanese language is helpful for installing the application, although not necessary by any means.

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA016.../download.html
ArtRage

Just like PaintChat, ArtRage is a free application, with the best oil paint simulation engine to date. If you're not the type of person who knows exactly what you want to achieve when you start painting, ArtRage may provide the same kind of difficulty as real oils; the fact that it's very hard to overpaint wet paints without blending the colors into some weird hodgepoke.

http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html

Hmm, did I forget any? openCanvas perhaps, which is a pretty cool multi-user "Photoshopesque" application, but I don't use it very often.

Chruser

I was looking at the opencanvas site (used the link in the apps thread) and what you can download from there is only a free 30 day trial unfortunately.

For a beginner, which would you suggest playing with to start off with?

Lenny

Lenny said:

For a beginner, which would you suggest playing with to start off with?

For a beginner to digital art with previous traditional art experience, Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter and PaintChat are all great. PaintChat is the only free application of the three, the rest are 30-day trials.

As for beginning in the field of drawing/painting, stick with a pencil, marker or ink pen, and many sheets of cheap paper. Don't buy the expensive art sketchbooks from stores, look into the kind of 6x8" to 9x12" notebooks you use for school. The blank notebooks without any stylesheet lines are what you're looking for, and they're sometimes ten to fifteen times cheaper than regular sketchbooks per page, at least over here in Sweden.

The best way to learn is to draw from life, and you will develop a sense of form and lighting impact far better than what can be learnt from studying photographs. If you do study photographs, try not to "copy" them, but try to understand them. Why does the light fall upon the object the way it does? How do the plants in the far background grow? Feel the gesture of the scene.

Chruser

Have you ever heard of a program called Paint.net?

I was flicking through a computer magazine called Computeractive (don't know if you've heard of it, if you have, Paint.net is described in the new issue - 18th to 31st August 2005) and this program caught my eye.

It's freeware and is available to download from the Computeractive site. You may enjoy it:

www.computeractive.co.uk/2129101

That link takes you to a page with a description of the program, specs (of sorts) and a link to download it.

In the computer active magazine it is described:

Quote:

This enhanced version of the standard Paint program that comes with Windows offers some powerful features that are normally to be found in paid-for-image-editing programs. In addition to basic editing tools it includes support for layers and several visual effects, and it is possible to use the Undo function multiple times. This program requires the .Net framework to be installed - go to www.computeractive.co.uk/netframework if it is not already installed.