I have to be honest. I haven't used ArtRage as much as I ought to. I've been stuck in my ways using Photoshop (now using PSCC) but that's because I've been using Photoshop for 20 years now, it's just what I've been used to.

I had ArtRage 3 and now have upgraded to AR4. And I have to say that I'm VERY impressed.

I'm so impressed especially having just finished teaching an art student of mine the fundamentals of digital art. She is an aspiring artist, she sketches and draws, but needs to keep drawing more and more. She has got some good talent. She got a Wacom Bamboo tablet that has ArtRage with it and she wanted to know about that program. So I opened up my ArtRage and was showing her around it. I'm pretty rusty myself but I managed well. I was showing her how to draw the human eye and she watched me complete it.

Here's my work. I actually started drawing it without any references, but I wanted to show her how to pin references within AR so I did that, but I picked a photo of an eye that was the opposite eye of what I was drawing/painting. It was a challenge for me as well, but a good challenge. And I encouraged her to do the same. It's something I grew up with when I was going through art classes, the teacher would continually give us assignments that encouraged us to pick references that were the opposite side of what we were to draw, for instance... pick a b/w photo of a shoe, cut it in half, throw the one half away, and mount it to your drawing and draw the other side. It is a great exercise.

Well now that was what I was doing precisely in AR. The way references are pinned are so much better than what can be done in Photoshop which is kind of clunky by comparison trying to do the same thing.

So here's a snap shot of the eye I worked on in front of my student. She was on cloud 9 when she saw the progress, and I was quite satisfied, albeit nervous if it would ever come out well. But it did. Hope you enjoy. sorry for the long post

Note: My drawing of the eye isn't an exact representation of the photo reference as I started drawing mine a while before I got a reference. Tools used: pencil tool with various colors and blended with palette knife - that's all. Almost has an oil pastel look to it.

Click image for larger version. 

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