Digital Painting - Taking a Page from the Winemakers Notebook

I am often amazed at how wines from the same variety of grapes can produce such different results. Some of this is due to different growing regions, and differences in soil and weather, but more and more it is due to the master vintner’s ability to blend different wines together. These component blends, that each in it’s own right is imperfect, together harmonize to produce a complex and pleasing taste that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Much of my digital work is done very much in the same way. By blending multiple images together, they can produce a harmony that each one by itself cannot achieve. To achieve this successfully requires a bit of mastery of different techniques, and then experimenting to see what they produce when blended.

Step 1 – Seeing Parts and Not Just the Whole

To begin this blending process, it is important to see your artwork as parts and not a whole. Each facet, be it the background, a face, a hand…. Each one is going to be a part of a large whole.

Step 2- My Own Brand of “Mucking Up”

Those of you familiar with Jeremy Sutton’s techniques are probably familiar with the technique of “mucking up”. This is the process of simply trying a whole lot of strokes and brushes to begin to divorce the image from it’s photographic roots. My own brand of mucking up begins using some undocumented techniques with Microsoft’s Digital Image Pro® to start to get both a medium look, and abstract the image in terms of color and degrees of detail. As I do this, I keep a notebook of the formula’s I use to create them. Then if I need to go back and re-do it, which I often do, I have a record of what I did to create it. I then save each image in its own right.

As I am creating these renditions, I am looking at specific areas within the image. I may produce several just for the background look, and one for just the face, hands, foliage, etc. What I am after here is variation of brushwork and detail and texture. I am not looking at this point for one thing to carry the whole final image.

Step 3- The Blending Process

Having produced anywhere from three to twenty different renditions I now bring them all into Corel Painter to begin the blending process. I start to look through them to see which one I want to be my base image, and then what parts from other images I may want to bring in to it.

Step 4- Rough and Smooth Offset Each Other

This is a technique I use quite a lot. By rough, I mean images that have bold strokes, lots of color variation and medium imprint, but very abstract or rough details. The smooth image is one that has smaller brush strokes, less color variation but more details. I then take one or the other and paste it on top of the other. Since all my images are created exactly the same size, this is very easy to do. Painter’s layers allow me to adjust the opacity of the upper layers that produce a blending effect of the two. I can also change the composite method as well to produce a synthesis of the two or more layers. I’ll then possibly add a new layer and using the cloning brush bring in details to specific parts of an image such as maybe just the eyes or hair, and then adjust the opacity slightly to better blend the two. In this way I build the “palette” of the image in much the same way as the winemaker builds the palette of the wine he is producing. The art of this is to get the blend just right.

Step 5- Completing the Vision

Often the difference between a master artist and an amateur is the ability to complete a vision. It’s both knowing how to refine it, and when to stop. Once I have this rough blend I go to work on it to refine it into the final taste so-to-speak. This is where I use the Corel Painter brushes and masks to hone the final piece. Often times this part takes the longest and I may have to do complete start-over’s to incorporate changes to my original photo template, or may need to build new images to capture more or less detail and brush look to specific parts. I’ve learned to do iterative saves to allow me to backtrack if needed, and make extensive use of layers to make alterations before committing them to the final canvas.

Step 6- Letting it Age

Before I complete the final print, I’ll make a smaller test print and then let it age. By this I mean letting things rest and then looking at it again with a refreshed set of eyes to see what subtle changes I want to make. Just as with wine, sometimes the longer it ages, the more changes I may want to make but the better it improves the final result.

Step 7- Savoring  the Results

Each person has their own tastes for wine, just as they do for art. Showing my work at art shows allows me to let others view my work and see how it fits in with their own likes and dislikes. But it also gives me a chance to stand back from my own completed works, and savor my results. It is this feeling of accomplishment, even more than a sale, that continues to drive me toward excellence as an artist.

See an example of this process