a rose as promised

As promised yesterday, here’s what I came up with on Painter – I decided on a different rose.

The original picture had three roses in different states of opening, but I decided on just this one, mainly because of time – I’m usually doing this at 6am real time (which is like 11pm my time) and so I’m quite tired and ready for bed.

This one is ok, although I don’t like it as much as the yellow rose. I like the green background – I tried to make it abstracty and blurred so that it gives the impression of leaves but is just a coloured background.

The flower isn’t as detailed as I’d have liked, I think that’s partly because I was quite tired, plus the picture I was working from wasn’t the best quality in the first place. But I like the colours.

I like doing the same subject matter over and over again, means that you get in good practice with it – you kind of train your eye into a certain way of working.

digital painting

I’ve got the art bug back and it’s painting that’s lit my fire.

During my time at college I only did painting. I did modules in other things too, but it was always painting that was at the top of my list. I never liked any of the 3D things we did (apart from ceramics), and actually actively Avoided textiles and print making.

But then last year I started doing sculpture with polymer clay and loved it! So ever since, I’ve kind of put the painting on hold and concentrated on that. Plus I made beads out of clay too, and wire jewellery.

Now I’ve discovered Corel Painter, I’m hooked right back on the painting again!

I don’t have a very ‘3D Brain’ I don’t think...I find it quite hard to do art in 3D, because of the things I mentioned here – the extra planes is the big thing, with painting there’s only one to worry about, with sculpture there’s actually infinite numbers.

It’s partly being a woman, it’s a biological fact that woman aren’t as good at 3D perception. There are tests for it I’ve done, they are sometimes in I.Q. tests, like being shown a net of an object and being asked which 3D object out of four it represents – it’s difficult for a female brain to work it out for some reason – I believe it’s the ‘hunter-gatherer’ part of us, the male has to spear down a wilder beast so has to know about depth perception and 3D things, the females need to know about nurturing in the cave.

Now I'm not saying women can't be sculptors, I'm just stating biological fact here - don't shoot the messenger. I do find painting easier than sculpting (not that either is ‘easy’), I'm not going to choose between them or stop doing either, but I think deep down I'm more of a painter than a sculptor.

Anyway...here are some of the things I’ve come up with the last couple of days using Corel Painter (I've also made two bracelets using that >> book as a reference).

This is a charcoal drawing on an oil painted background – I wanted the flower to be quite rough and to obviously have see through bits to show the background. I also wanted to keep the foreground subdued while the background blared out with brightness.

This is an oil painting of the same rose, except using realistic colours. I wanted this one to be as real as I could get it, but also still a little abstract in that I haven’t included every tiny detail and fold of the petals, I have left most of the detail to the viewer. All I wanted was it to be yellow and real enough that someone could say – ‘that’s a rose’. I also used a great complimentary background colour, with white in the centre to make the rose glow ;)

I’m just about to do another painting which I’ll post tomorrow when it’s done, possibly of a rose, possibly of the Same rose again, I don’t know. I have plenty of stock photos from my college days and other stuff I’ve picked up over the years stashed on my computer for artistic reference :P