Approaching Storm
Much of the time I’m unsatisfied with the outcome of what I’m drawing or painting. I’m rarely unsatisfied with the process of practice and learning, just unsatisfied with the result. I think this is natural for a student of any age, and I consider myself a student.
However, every now and then I paint or draw something which I think shows progress in my study, and this digital study is one of those times. It’s subject is a bird, but thematically it’s about much more. As a minstrel poet of our times once wrote: “You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
Art details: The crow and stump were painted freehand in Photoshop, using a photo as a reference. It is not a paint-over or a photo manipulation, nor do I trace. I start with a rough sketch, black on white, just like with a ‘real’ pencil or brush, and build up the layers with semi-transparent brushstrokes, bit by bit. The Photoshop file was opened in Corel Painter, where the background was painted on other layers using customized brushes. The whole thing was brought back into Photoshop for final color correction, watermark and jpegging. I am working on a non-digital version of this also which may be available for sale. For this digital study I used a small Wacom tablet that’s about 5 years old, nothing fancy.
Wishing I was there …
Well, here I sit trapped indoors, when I’d really rather be vacationing. But I’m sort of on-call doing graphics for one of our projects, yet I’m not needed every single minute. What to do with idle hands?
The photo that this is derived from came in today from an art list I’m on, so I decided to take a crack at it with Painter. I started the way I would if I was painting in acrylic or oil, with a rough sketch, then underpainting, then adding detail until it looked vaguely beachlike. Kinda. Sorta. Hey, it’s been a long day.
Illustration Friday – Empty
This week’s Illustration Friday theme is Emptiness.
The inspiration for my project comes from the story of the Zen matriarch Chiyono.
As the legend goes, she had been seeking enlightenment for years, but it had eluded her, no matter how hard she studied and how diligently she practiced.
One night, she was carrying water in a very old bamboo bucket and noticed the reflection of the moon in the water. As she gazed at it, suddenly the bamboo band that held the bucket together fell apart. In that moment there was no bucket, no water and no moon, and she became enlightened. She wrote a verse about it and this is the popular translation:
“In this way and that I tried to keep the pail together.
I hoped the weak bamboo would never break.
Then suddenly the bottom fell out.
No more water; no more moon in the water.
Emptiness in my hand.”
