Landscape

[Delofasht]

Hello everyone, this is my first attempt at painting anything in ArtRage after getting my brushes where I wanted them to be and figuring out a basic approach. So after figuring out how everything worked (amazingly pretty close to how I used to paint traditionally years ago, though I never got very good back then), I decided I would so something that is comfortable to me.



I actually had to make some very specific brushes to get the effects I wanted. I generally work from thin light coats of paint to thicker more textured coats and then blend it back and add some thick stuff at the very end to get some texture back into the painting. Started with a pretty thin Block in Brush, 100% loaded so I could scribble it out, I'm in the middle of the Build up stage right now throwing some basic lighting and attempting to build some interesting colors in the clouds while keeping them somewhat transparent in some spots. I really thought this would be a bit easier in some areas but oh well. The lighting is done with super cheaty digital steps (color dodge layer and an airbrush ), and I smudged a bit of the foreground with a blur palette knife.

Moving forward, I will be attempting to keep this in as much traditional methods as I can except that I'm not mixing every color on a palette. Can't seem to find a color palette with a mixing tray. Oh well. . . color picker it is for now.

- Delofasht

[Delofasht]

I FOUND IT!!!! Open up References window, make a scrap page, throw the colors you are using as your palette on to it and mix away with a palette knife! YAY! Don't need to use the color picker now!

This is by far the best feature I've found about this program. . . now I wonder if I can tone my palette so I get mixes consistent with my canvas color. Hmm...

[Enug]

I'm always interested to hear how real media artists make the adjustment to AR and how they customise the tools to suit. Keep us posted on your discoveries. Looking good so far.

[BushcraftOnFire]

Very nice.. I like the textures that you have gotten.. terrific use of your tools!

D

[DarkOwnt]

I actually had to make some very specific brushes to get the effects I wanted. I generally work from thin light coats of paint to thicker more textured coats and then blend it back and add some thick stuff at the very end to get some texture back into the painting. Started with a pretty thin Block in Brush, 100% loaded so I could scribble it out, I'm in the middle of the Build up stage right now throwing some basic lighting and attempting to build some interesting colors in the clouds while keeping them somewhat transparent in some spots. I really thought this would be a bit easier in some areas but oh well. The lighting is done with super cheaty digital steps (color dodge layer and an airbrush ), and I smudged a bit of the foreground with a blur palette knife.

Moving forward, I will be attempting to keep this in as much traditional methods as I can except that I'm not mixing every color on a palette. Can't seem to find a color palette with a mixing tray. Oh well. . . color picker it is for now.

- Delofasht

One way to work "less cheaty" is to replace your use of the airbrush with a very faint oil brush: loading 100, thinners 70-90, keep InstaDry ON. Play with the rest of your settings to taste. You can play with stiffness to make the effect look more or less "brushy" and use of the stylus can make your strokes very subtle like an airbrush effect. Useful for lighting or simulating smudging or blur without digital cheaty tools. I also have found this particular kind of brush useful for creating manual gradients; simply pick up colors as you go.

[Delofasht]

Thanks for the feedback!

@Enug: Well I learned most of my methods from traditional standpoints but I have no lack of computer software knowledge. I'm about 2 years into heavily studying various software, looking for that perfect blend of tools that feel like traditional media. The feel of ArtRage is amazingly close actually, especially when you can recognize how some of the names of things might not quite be what they are in traditional (pressure and stiffness seem a touch odd to me but I've managed to make them work pretty close).

@BushcraftOnFire: Thanks! I'm working on maintaining and furthering those stroke textures as I go forward, smoothing the clouds and getting the grass to have some little tiny upward strokes in later on.

@DarkOwnt: Interesting tip, trying to figure out how to make the strokes I make with super thin paint like that controlled. . . I'm getting a bit closer but I will probably fall back on putting my lighting on a separate layer and blending out from the point of lights as best I can to allow me to erase back to the dry layer underneath. Edit: After messing around a bit more with it on a scrap I figured out how to make that work in a way that feels close to like an old Bob Ross method of painting a thin paint on top of a thick one (I think he said, "As we know a thin paint will stick to a thick one"). Pretty cool technique, unfortunately I won't get the cracking of that thin paint as it dries. . . digital paint doesn't dry out at different rates. That said this is a really helpful and cool technique for productivity! I had to make the brush really thin as well as stiff (100%) with really low pressure (35 ish%), instant dry, auto cleaning optional completely, 90% thinner and I like a very small aspect ratio of 8% with some rotation 25%. This has yielded a very nice result for me.

Edit: I've started to make notes on many of these techniques on a pad of paper beside me and when I get moved into my new place in a couple months I'll try making a video about them.

I'll post an update in the next few days; want to get through as much of phase 2 as I can before posting again.

[Enug]

This all sounds wonderful - it will be a great help to people like me who have had no training and only dabbled in acrylics in real media. So glad you joined us.

[Rondo]

Sorry but i don't see how to pick up mixed color from my scrap paper without the color sampler? i tried it but i can't pick up my mixed color with oil brush nor water pensel, you have to use the color sampler. Or do i miss something?

[Delofasht]

@Rondo: Well you DO have to pick up color with the picker to load the brush, unless you did the mixing with the brush or knife and didn't have the auto clean on. I mean much more that I am not picking colors from the mixes on the canvas, which is an important difference. In most software when you pick from the canvas you inevitably end up desaturating your color choices, this is much less of an occurrence in ArtRage than in say Photoshop or Painter. The key about picking up color from a palette is that it takes your eyes and hands away from your painting for a moment, you are more likely to pick the color more carefully and end up with livelier blends of color and color variety than if you were to use a perfect gradient from the color panel or from the mix right next to the color you were using on the canvas. Very often what ends up making digital art look so digital is a lack of interesting color because it's a perfect gradient from one color to the next with no variation in saturation and value. My love of using a color palette and mixing on a separate canvas has been something I've been using for ages (even in other software). I actually used to do this on a separate layer on my painting, which is actually another way of having a large Mixing palette, but the scrap reference sheet is nice in ArtRage as it let's me hide it or keep it up on the screen pinned away from my painting yet accessible.

@Enug: A lot of this has been learned from books and such over years of reading and practicing too, I'm more than happy to share my notes, many of which are being recorded as I describe this painting coming together. I'm almost done with my second phase of the painting too, another hour or so of working out some compositional things and I'll probably post an update. It's really awesome to know it could be helpful to others, I'd never really considered that before.

So update soon! I'll give some notes on what I'm doing in the second stage and thinking of when I'm building each phase of this painting.

- Delo

[Delofasht]

I'm getting close to done with my second pass on this using my more detailed brushes and all. . . not liking how my little boat is positioned at the moment will probably paint over that at some point. I'll be going into 3rd pass in the next day or so after I put a bit more work on a few of the mid ground elements, specifically the bushes up against the cliff wall need some sort of cast shadow on them to put them in the right kind of placement with the rest of the painting, and a lot of elements here or there that I'm going to shift as I go, nothing major just yet but I might put a dock in there for the boat. . . a small pier of some form maybe. Could even throw some kids fishing on it or something.

So in this pass I was establishing the lighting and trying to make sure to spread some of the colors from each area into other areas so it doesn't look unbalanced in color or saturation, I feel like the left side of the painting is a bit heavy and more saturated than the right but I can fix that as I move into later stages because I'll start really digging in with more detailed brushes in the next couple passes. This stage is about lighting and breaking up shapes while putting a bit of textures and such in here and there, suggesting the kind of trees and plants that might be in the area. Looking at it now I feel like there needs to be some variation at the top of the closer cliffs and perhaps a bit more variation in saturation and value to push some of the area where the waterfall is located back in space a bit, the entire painting is still reading as too flat to me at the moment.

Next Pass will be bringing in my "Broken Color" brush setting to get some further color variation and texture while I apply some more interesting lighting and just start really refining away. Before I start going into that though I will increase the resolution of this painting by roughly double it's current resolution (which is quite low. . . 1200 by 675 pixels) This is a tiny painting and I never thought I could get so much grit and texture in such a small space. . . I'm used to needing 3 to 4 times this resolution to get crisp edges that seem to come for free in ArtRage.

I normally like to start with an idea in mind when I start a painting but because I didn't expect to turn this painting into a full on painting it's kind of boring as a subject matter. . . just some nice day on a little "lake" surrounded by greenery. I'm sure I could make it much more interesting if I try by the end of it all but I like the general flow of the land as a whole.

If you have any questions regarding something specific in the painting thus far that you would like to know feel free to ask I haven't put too much thought into this other than where the light would be coming from and basically what kind of light it would be and time of day, clouds give some nice variation in values in several areas. Also I posted a screenshot trimmed a bit so you can see my palette in the reference window zoomed in, also I run an extra window of the painting to allow me to see it at a smaller scale, useful for when I am zoomed in pretty far but still want to see the effect some of my work in one area is having on the whole painting, also if I really needed to I could color pick from that window as well.

- Delo