Saturday, June 13, 2009

Pulling Back the Curtain

I had a lot of positive feedback about my iphone drawings so I wanted to share them one more time, but with a twist: the application allows the user not only to retrieve the image outside of the phone in an online gallery, but also saves the information which records every brush stroke.

In other words, you can export a quicktime showing the image being created, stroke by stroke. So here are the images I posted before, but showing them as they were created. You can see where I made changes, corrections, choices.

Both the palm tree and the black and white portrait were done from my imagination, no reference, just staring into the tiny screen and making them up as I went along:

Here is the palm, from start to finish:



Here is the black/white portrait from start to finish:



Now in an effort at full disclosure, the final image I posted, of my husband driving, was probably the most impressive looking BUT I did have a leg-up with the app. I first snapped a photo of him with the phone and imported that into the drawing app. Then I began painting ON TOP of the photo.




Using the phone in a moving car was pretty tricky, made a lot of sloppy strokes, so using the photo as a starting point was helpful. You might even say it is "cheating", but once you begin to lay down the paint, the photo disappears beneath it and you are left to continue layering and figuring out details that have already been obscured.

So -- you can see also that some of the areas along the edges (ear, collar) were pretty much still the photo, left unpainted. I had zoomed in while working on the face and neglected some of the outer areas. The photo definitely helped lay down a structure with the correct proportions, etc. but once I got painting, particularly on the hat, you can see that I was pretty much out there on my own.

Enough -- back to my studio to work on real paint and paper/canvas paintings.

And big thanks to those already viewing and buying prints! Note the new direct link at the upper right of the blog, which brings you to my Etsy shop if you are interested in looking at what is for sale. More items added every few days.........

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Paint-by-numbers" for grown-ups!
Thanks for all the insight.

Melanie said...

These paintings are great--very interesting to watch you draw them.

Anonymous said...

That's crazy! Fun to watch the strokes appear!

Lola