Watercolor WIPs- Sharing and Learning

[Fashmir]

Great tutorial Steve. Thanks for sharing your methods and ideas. I have a question about the colorful tool panel seen to the right of the screen in your video... What is that? I am always intrigued by tools that extend capability and refine workflow.

[Steve B]

Hey everyone,
It's very cool that people are checking the video out.!! Yeah!

I've got another out now too. This new one (2/5) goes over Dry Brush and Wet into Wet Techniques. I use the Layer Texture settings a lot, as well as various Brush settings, to simulate dry brush techniques. I also use the Lock Transparency feature to play with wet into wet effects. I go over both of these in the new video. Here's the link.

Fashmir,
Re: the cool little toolbar-- THIS is the super awesome toolbar I've been talking about, the "add-on" that I've been building with another Artrage user for the last 6 months or so. It runs independently from Artrage (only on Windows though), but is designed to work in conjunction with it. It basically allows me to work on Clear Screen on a tablet pc or a Cintiq with almost zero need for a keyboard. I can do stuff like
-rotate, draw straight lines, transform, or lasso with the click of a button.
-I can also do multiple redo's without having to tap the Artrage onscreen button repeatedly-- just down the button on this toolbar and it zips backwards.
-What's also really cool is I can link zoom and resize to my second pen button. So, I can resize to 500 or whatever by clicking my 2nd pen button and dragging the pen tip. I can also zoom by just clicking the back button and "hover-dragging" above the screen.

Right now, we're hammering out the last details to have Hover Icons-- this allows you to "bind" your opened Artrage Pods to a small onscreen icon that visually takes it place, even while using full screen mode. Then all I have to do is hover my pen on top of the Hover Icon, and instantly the Artrage pod pops out. This allows you to work on a big screen with almost nothing in your way in terms of UI, and yet have full instant access to all of your pods and key commands that you might need.

Clearly, I'm very excited about sharing this. Right now, we're ironing out some last few bugs and doing some tests, but as you can see, I use it all the time. I'm planning on sharing it with the community for free. I'm actually looking for testers as well, to find bugs that might pop up on systems other than the ones we've been testing it on.

It's very COOL! I'm planning on doing a video on it as well.

[Fashmir]

Thanks Steve. That seems pretty cool. I just watched your second video and I love the bit about locking the transparency of a layer and washing in new color. This is very good use of the tools.

[Shibui]

I was in the class with Karen, but was not able to participate at the time. Did follow everything and so glad you are sharing yor tips online. Thanks, Gail

[MSIE]

thank you Steve for the tutorials, well done!
what about posting them in "Tips & Tricks" forum so people can find them easily?

[Tigermoth]

Well I replied to your PM Steve, fabulous job and everyone is already giving ya feedback - you should be getting plenty.

I'm already looking forward to the next ones in the series.

[chinapete]

Steve, I've watched your videos and want to add my voice to those in praise of what you've accomplished, and in the spirit of learning and sharing, also add a comment of my own ...


I find it striking that you endorse an idea I've promoted consistently in all of my digitial work, that digital art should try to emulate natural media ... On the surface, this sounds reasonable, and it is after all one of the selling points of AR ... But I wonder how many of your viewers actually agree with that idea -- I say this because reactions to my own work, where I have almost obsessively pursued imitation of natural media, seem to ignore the traditional elements in those artworks in favor of anything "new" or at least different ... It's as if people want to believe that digital art holds the promise of allowing an artist to do something really wild and strange and never before seen in the visual arts, or at any rate, cut loose from the traditional arts ...


That is an unlikely possibility, given the long history of non-digital art, and the thousands of creative minds that have contributed to the history of art ... I say this not because I'm old-fashioned or a traditionalist, but because clearly there are valuable lessons to be learned from natural media, lessons that can improve one's art and at the same time deepen our understanding of the advantages and limitations of digital art -- recently on this forum I wrote at length about the basic concept of gradation, something you touch on but don't name in your videos --


Identifying limitations in turn should help the folks at AR to refine the tool set -- with the goal of bringing it closer and closer to natural media, of course....


As an example, when you suggest that we "roughen" at the edges or draw outside of the lines that define the cat, at that point you actually are giving your viewers an art lesson, aren't you? ... That lesson has little to do with digital or non-digital -- it's a psychological fact that texture and fuzzy boundaries cause visual responses that differ in interesting ways from, say, flat cartoon-like linear drawing (the very definition of most digital art) -- and I believe this is why you seem to insist that these effects "look better" -- a value judgment that, again, I'm not sure the majority of your viewers will share, if I were to judge by standards for popular digital art ...


In this connection, I am always amazed that AR treats the iPhone and iPad platforms as step-sisters to the lovely Cinderella known as the desktop ... I believe the iPhone and iPad are much more powerful tools for emulating natural media, because with them you actually touch the screen ... The tactile dimension is one that I try to exploit in all of my works -- these by the way mostly are judged failures, if I am to go by the number and quality of comments they receive ... I don't mind, I just take it as further proof that most people who look at artwork created digitally see no relation to similar work done in natural media ... Or they themselves haven't had the experience of softening a charcoal drawing on newsprint, or laying down an ink or watercolor wash on textured paper, and so on ...


In the attachment, I offer an image I created in like two seconds using Auryn Ink, a program that specializes in watercolor ... I think you can see that it is possible -- if emulating natural media is the goal -- to do that quickly and without any need for all of the powerful tools you demonstrate ... I simply pick up my Nomad brush, select a color and brush setting, and paint on the iPad screen ... The question is -- it is a question and not a criticism -- why can't I have the ease of that experience in AR on any platform (iPhone has no watercolor tool, iPad has or had lag problems and lacks the power of the desktop application, AR Pro is not tactile in the way I define tactile) ...


I look forward to your future videos ...

[Steve B]

Thanks everyone for the responses! It's nice to hear, and I'm doing it to share. I like the idea, MSIE, of making an additional thread in the Tips and Techniques thread. I should be uploading a new one today. When I do so, I'll make an alternate thread there, for reference. Mostly, I'd just like things to be findable, so they're useful to others.

Chinapete,
That's a really interesting post!

For what its worth, I think your experiments are fascinating and often very successful. In my mind, you're clearly a benefit to the community, and am glad you continue to share. I do think we're all sort of waiting with bated breath for you to do something on a larger, perhaps more "ambitious" scale. At first, I often thought you were mostly making studies-- exploring techniques and methods, trying to duplicate some small part of a famous painting, etc. and that you were, in time, going to be produce something larger, more human focused, perhaps a landscape, etc, whatever. Now, however, I feel like your focus is more on producing these more intimate gestural explorations, and that the images have more to do with mood and texture than specifically to do with a subject. Thus questions like "Is this a fan?" and "Is this a rock?" matter less to me when viewing your works. I tend to focus more on texture, brush movement, the play of color, etc. because I feel like that's what you're bringing to the table. I quite like the work you've been posting on here, and find it quite successful. It broadens the palette, so to speak, and I like bringing that into my work.

I think your results on the iPad are fascinating. Auryn Ink is a great app and has some powerful and interesting watercolor tools. I was just watching a video on it, and I love that you can tilt the canvas, that it pushes pigment to the edges, that it has a counter for "drying" so that it mixes differently depending on how wet or dry the pigment on the canvas is, etc. These are things that I think Artrage could very easily be doing. I hope they get there in Artrage 4.

Re: digital art and natural media-
Your point about about people seeming to gravitate to the seemingly "open" and purely.... pixel based notion of digital art is well put. Having said that, I don't know if I'd say that digital media should try to emulate natural media. Rather, I would say that I want my art to emulate natural media. This is a rather broader topic, but, to me, the point of art is beauty and a desire to interact with the world through it. I don't see why pixel based, digital-only art can't do that. However, for me I find certain visual things interesting and evocative, things based on texture and viscosity and granulation-- probably based on my experience growing up in an art world without digital work. Essentially, those things are the elements by which I explore and judge a works value, because those works I grew up learning art through had those elements for me to judge them by. It's like an art muscle I've developed-- now I use it, as I have it. Who knows, perhaps in 20-30 years there will be a whole generation of kids who will have grown up reading comics painted digitally, looking at video game art done digitally, viewing artwork online that's digitally done in Photoshop, and then they'll prefer the aesthetics those things provide.

I will say that art done digitally allows a kind of control and detail that's difficult to achieve with natural media tools unless you're painting big. Alternately, part of the appeal and focus in natural media is how to pare things down a bit to their essential elements-- a desire and practice that I've long thought is born just as much from the processes required to make art with natural media tools as it is from independently chosen aesthetics. The two are intimately tied.... process and intended aesthetic result, because I think often you learn to make something good from your limitations. Essentially, the standards by which we judge the value of a natural media artwork are partly based on the limits of what natural media tools can do. I would imagine that, for example, Chinese ink art is loose and bristly with its brush work because 1) it reflects the aesthetics and philosophy of that society, and yet 2) because that's what their tools were capable of producing-- so they worked with what they had and made something good out of a limitation. Thus we learn to actively apply positive standards that reward us for the limits of our tools. If that makes sense. It's not the whole game, of course, but I think its part of it.

With digital artwork, however, you're able to include a great deal more detail in a very small canvas because you're allowed a greater degree of control over the tools you work with compared to natural media alternatives. This has led to a style that focuses on two basic things, IMO- 1) artwork that is very focused on detail, even when doing small sketches or roughs, and 2) artwork that is very precise in terms of linework and color fills. Additionally, as there is no canvas, texture and grit is lost unless it is actively introduced by the artist. This is an interesting shift, as the focus, IMO, becomes on how to introduce chance/grit/ambient effects into a digital painting instead of trying to control the tools more and more, like a lot of natural media art still tries to do (with new types of paint or new types of paper or brushes, etc).

It's a peculiar dilemma. I think almost all artists would like greater control of their medium so that they can better express what they have in their mind. Simultaneously, as I say in the second video, I think too much control can be a detriment to the final product, the results of which somehow end up feeling dictated by the whims of the digital tool rather than the mind and heart of the artist. So, that's why I think it's good to introduce some element of chance into ones process when painting digitally, as I think it gives the artist something to "push against".

So... on that level perhaps I do think digital art should emulate natural media-- but more because I think a good artist needs to knock against some chance to discover those things that are going to make an image engaging, than because I think natural media is somehow innately "better." I guess you did catch me teaching about "art-making" instead of just "digital technique" in the video! I actually thought, while recording it, "Heh, I'm really starting to talk about how I think art should be made, and not exactly about how this specific technique equals this specific result." It's hard sometimes to separate the two. You'll see that even more in my upcoming video, where I go into how and why I use layers the way I do. It has a lot to do with emulating the process of painting with natural media, and how I think that process actually produces results that 1) better emulate natural media results and that 2) I think look more interesting because of that. So, yeah, it's hard to get from having an opinion! :P

BTW, where's you post on gradation? Can you link to it? That sounds like an interesting read.

I'll be back with the next video later this morning. I just need to annotate it.

[chinapete]

hi steve ...

... thank you for the generous and thoughtful reply ... if I haven't said it clearly enough, I admire your work, your technique, your ability to convey your ideas simply and with conviction, but most of all, the spirit of encouragement you bring to all who follow your thread -- and who now are able to watch your videos ...


... the real world is chaotic, textured and subtly colored, I cannot envision a time when digital art that doesn't faithfully record those features will be thought successful ... you can compare the historical moment when photography was introduced (I hinted at this in a recent post, "Souvenir"), artists in the 19th century began to despair at the thought that the high level of realism attainable in photography signalled the end of painting in natural media ... but in the 150 years or so since the birth of that technology, painters have continued to have an edge, the proof is in the many brilliantly textured and nuanced watercolors you have posted on this forum ...


... a purely digital world doesn't exist, nor does photographic realism, unless you define realism as mechanical reproduction ... traditional painting allows for levels of abstraction and interpretation rarely achieved in photography -- and when such abstraction is achieved, ironically it often is likened to painting ... Mechanical photographic realism in painting is a red herring, except to those -- not me -- who believe the brain is a computer, and the heart a machine ...

[Steve B]

OK! Next video is up. Here's the link.

This is on Layers and how I use them. For those who already know how to paint with natural media watercolors, parts of the video will be a review in many ways, but I also go into how I apply that process to my digital artwork, as well as why I think that matters. Namely, that process gives me results that I've been happy with.

Also, thanks for compliment Pete. It's appreciated, and I do try to work hard to be helpful. I think my experiments and failures can only help others. I've learned lots through the tutorials and videos of others that I've watched, so it's a pleasure to give something back.

I also have to say that I really like your final comment. The world is a chaotic and full of texture and subtlety. Or atleast I think so. That's a very articulate reason to describe why it is that we want those things in our art, in whatever capacity we're capable or receiving them. Gonna have to ponder that one for a while.