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11 may 00 - all sorts of dabblings

Here is something I was working on when the hand of fate decimated my site early this week.
I have long had an aversion to colour, maybe it's just lazyness. Anyway, "physical" painting just isn't my thing, so I begun to consider digital painting. But I don't go too much for the clean-style CG graphics you see in manga/anime style pictures. It is lovely, granted, but too pretty-clean for my taste, and the process itself is too methodical and mechanical for me ( at least as I understand it - may very well be my ignorance showing ). So instead of using ole photoshop of yore I picked up my copy of Painter 5 and dabbled away with the oil brushes. I hope you like it, here it is ( at the right you have the origial pencil drawing for comparison )

If you look at the big color picture in detail ( just click it ) you'll see why I love Painter 5. You can actually see the "brush strokes". I used the "big wet oils" brush and just painted away, using no plug-ins and no ajustable curves or special fx - just like grabbing a brush but without all the mess!

Painter, BTW, used to belong to Metacreations ( MCRE ) but now it is kind of in a limbo as the company decided to sell it to concentrate in its metastream format. A pity, just goes to show that stock market pressures do tend to ruin some good things...though it's ok, as they also create others, I guess...just wish that the old meta team was still together creating software that people actually liked to use. Let us just hope that Painter does not get sold to the Adobe robber-barons or the price tag could be steeply increased. It is for this reason that "open source" is important ( even when it is not "free software" ) since brilliant algorithms do not risk being lost and forgotten. I wish somebody would make a gimp that was more a copy of painter than a copy of photoshop...

Btw, if you are wondering why the picture seems to be unfinished...well, I suppose I could give you some artsy-fartsy justification, but the reality is that I didn't bother to finish it. So there.

In the next page you get a look at my second atempt.

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