Painting Digitally

Painting Digitally Notes, comments, ideas and suggestions for Watercolor Painting with Photoshop to supplement the Youtube videos. See http://www.PaintingDigitally.com Hi there.

My name is Robert Ardill and I’m a photographer and watercolor, pastel, charcoal and mixed-media painter. Over the last four years I have been experimenting with digital watercolors, starting with Corel Painter and Artrage and eventually settling on Photoshop as the tool that I’ve found suits me best. I’ve produced (with input from others, of course) a set of tools that include brushes, blenders,

erasers, papers and also actions to set up the painting and to create various watercolor effects, such as wet edges. You can get the tools at http://www.PaintingDigitally.com and you can see some videos explaining their use at https://www.youtube.com/user/SceneShifts/playlists. The "Watercolor Painting in Photoshop CS...CS6" playlist is the one to look at first. There is also a playlist on how to install the tools and one with tips on brushes and techniques. Digital painting is a lot of fun … and much less frustrating than painting with traditional media as it’s easy to go back and redo, correct, modify etc. This is especially true of watercolor painting which is well known to be a very difficult medium. Even if you decide that you want to use physical media rather than digital, you may well find that digital is a very good learning tool that will help you to master traditional watercolor painting more quickly. If you would like to see some of our photographs of Ireland, please visit our photography site at http://www.IrelandUpClose.com/.

25/04/2019

Issue with Photoshop CC
I have just noticed that Photoshop CC no longer replaces the brushes when a new paper is loaded: all the previously loaded brushes are still there (even if you select Replace All the Brushes) when you run the Change Paper To ### action.
I will fix this, but in the meantime please delete the brush sets you no longer need and especially make sure you select the correct brush set for this paper (otherwise you will not get the correct interaction between the brush and the paper).
Robert

Hi ... here is another portrait ... this time of a painter friend of mine. He's in his studio with some of his paintings...
18/01/2018

Hi ... here is another portrait ... this time of a painter friend of mine. He's in his studio with some of his paintings behind him.

I seem to be into portraits this winter :). Here's a watercolor of my grandson. He was petting a large old labrador.I p...
10/01/2018

I seem to be into portraits this winter :). Here's a watercolor of my grandson. He was petting a large old labrador.

I painted this on Arches Aquarelle Not paper.

Watercolor on Arches Aquarelle Not paper.

Here's another charcoal portrait ... again off a photo from the web.
09/01/2018

Here's another charcoal portrait ... again off a photo from the web.

I've painted over the charcoal drawing of the miner (previous post) in pastels ... here is the result.I had to make a co...
08/01/2018

I've painted over the charcoal drawing of the miner (previous post) in pastels ... here is the result.

I had to make a couple of adjustments (nose should be bent as in photo, and softened the hairline), but otherwise the pastel was just painted over the charcoal.

I haven't seen this done in traditional painting although there's no reason why not (after spraying the charcoal with fixative). Actually it's quite a good idea because charcoal is great for drawing and is easy to erase, smudge etc., without clogging up the tooth of the paper. So all of the adjustments and compositional changes could be made in charcoal, spray with fixative (digital equivalent of painting on a new layer) and then apply pastel.

Here's a charcoal drawing of a young miner from Andalusia. I got his photograph from the web (great photo!). I drew it...
06/01/2018

Here's a charcoal drawing of a young miner from Andalusia. I got his photograph from the web (great photo!).

I drew it on Canson Mi-Teintes paper with a light grayish color (this is the background color). I also used some white charcoal for highlights (because the paper color is too dark for areas like the eyes and nose/cheek highlights).

I may use this drawing as an underpainting for a pastel painting ... after all it has all that's needed.

Here is another painting of the shoes painting that I published earlier. It's a pastel painting this time (the other was...
22/12/2017

Here is another painting of the shoes painting that I published earlier. It's a pastel painting this time (the other was a watercolor painting). I painted it on a dark UART Sanded paper.

20/12/2017

I have released a new set of tools for CS6 and CC (not CS5 or pre-CS5). This release gives a mechanism to omit brushes and tool presets from the full set: so you can keep only the brushes/tool presets you commonly use. You could also use the mechanism to keep multiple sets: for example one for pastels, one for charcoal, one for gouache, and one for watercolors.

The release number is v9.2.2. To get this release download your tools again and re-install them (the same link that you had for the previous release will work).

For a short explanation of how to use the new feature please see http://www.paintingdigitally.com/PI-help.htm %20Brushes

I will publish a short video in the next days showing the mechanism in practice.

I hope you like this addition: it should make brush/tool selection much easier.

Please let me know if you have any problems with the release.

Robert

Hi .. here is a painting that I published on the PaintingDigitally group a while back. In the background I've tried to ...
18/12/2017

Hi .. here is a painting that I published on the PaintingDigitally group a while back.

In the background I've tried to give the impression of lots of tones and movement and also a sort of dreamy feeling with the fading out at the bottom, with splashes like notes. As an experiment I painted the girl in a posterized way (I put down the lightest tone then a darker one on it, and another one on it (5 in all). It looks odd close up but is quite effective when viewed from a few feet away ... or you can squint your eyes a bit to get a similar effect). Painting in this way is quite a good exercise because it forces one to paint shapes rather than parts of a body or thing.

Here is something a bit different. A watercolor of some shoes, brush and polish. I painted it on Bockingford Not at a s...
26/11/2017

Here is something a bit different. A watercolor of some shoes, brush and polish. I painted it on Bockingford Not at a size of 16"x12".

Hi ... here are a couple of recent paintings. The pastel is of a tree beside the Boyne river at Slane Castle in Ireland ...
16/11/2017

Hi ... here are a couple of recent paintings. The pastel is of a tree beside the Boyne river at Slane Castle in Ireland (near my house). The watercolor is based (from memory) on a painting by the Irish artist Dayld Daly ... I really liked his three sheep (and also the loose approach to the grasses).

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Slane
MEATH

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+353 86 6058190

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