Never Trust This Person

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to mess around with digital art, but this weekend I managed to finish a landscape piece. It’s my second attempt at landscape, and I had to to keep in mind that all the elements to an evocative landscape piece such as the foreground, background, dominance, and light were effectively used.

I wanted to make it really really good because this was made as a belated birthday present for my awesome friend Estel. I hope you like it.

Please view it full-size here!

Reference used for human silhouette, brushes used for trees and some parts of the sky. Texture from CG Textures.
Working time: 8+ hours
Photoshop CS2 and SAI Easy Paint Tool

I seem to have a thing about putting butterflies into my work, as well as lots of mossy, misty, green landscapes. I’m not very good at the originality thing, but meh. Time to fix my body clock!

My laptop died a few weeks ago, and this meant that the digital art applications I used would be unable to run on this second-hand laptop. Eventually I stumbled upon an awesome digital art program that combines the brush versatility of Corel Painter (there’s Painter 11 out now, can’t wait to try that out) and Photoshop’s interface. Corel Painter X has great brushes but chomps up your computer resources if you use layers in your painting and – this is just silliness on my part – I’m still not entirely fluent with using the software. I always had to switch between Photoshop and Painter, and the layer compatibility isn’t always up to scratch.

I found Easy Paint Tool SAI [fan-made English language pack here], and I love it. It has real-time rotation (PS doesn’t have it olol) and a basic set of brushes (pen, brush, marker, airbrush, water, acrylic, paper, crayon). It doesn’t have the features of Photoshop like selecting and rotating certain parts of the painting, text or fancy filters, but it’s very lightweight and loads in seconds. It’s literally pick-up-a-brush-and-start-painting: the strokes are absolutely smooth, and like most digiart software, the other end of the pen is configured to switch to an eraser. There is also layer and blending modes, hue/saturation toggles, canvas size configurations etc. It’s PS and Corel without frills.

Using my Wacom Bamboo I did a speed(ish) painting, and I really loved the blending of the brush.

(I need to refine my technique or something, bleh)

Here’s a better artist that can show you what SAI can do:

Happy Easter! I hope it’s full of chocolate.