Sorry for missing last month’s post. I have been caught up working on my next book, I feel better with a frog in my throat, the final cover for the fantastic Houdini Series by Thomas Lalicki (shown here) and lastly my new history blog ....which I swear you will love even if you hate history.
1. If you don’t see the Color Sets palette – select WINDOW/ COLOR PALETTES / COLOR SET. The Color Set looks like a bunch of swatches similar to how Photoshop displays them.Painter will now make a color set from that image. That’s it. Paint with Caravaggio’s colors.
This color set might not have every color that you want. You can also add colors to your color set by clicking on the little color swatch add symbol at the bottom (circled in red here)
You can also mix your own colors up in the mixer pad and then again click on the little arrow to the right and select “ New Color Set from Mixer Pad”
Let me know if this is helpful. And if you don’t have Painter, then just download a 30 day-trial to check it out from the banner on the right.
Reversing numbers is a peculiarity we all share. Even reversing letters happens sometimes in our addled brains. If we do it often, we have a fancy name for this phenomenon…dyslexia. But what about artists who reverse images in their mind?
Throw on your petticoat, grab your parasol, button up your britches and rush on over to Picture Book Junkies to enter to win a FREE signed copy of The Raucous Royals.
The Ballyhoo has been “hearted” by the amazing, death-defying talents of krisztina maros at sketch pause.
I have not posted a circus image in a while so I couldn't resist showing an illustration of the man who truly knew how to get out of a can. This picture is from Who Put the B in the Ballyhoo? and depicts Houdini's Chinese Water Torture Cell. Read more about other escapes from tight places like the infamous Milk Can Escape.
Visit Sketch Theatre to see artists create their illustrations under a high speed camera. I thought it was especially interesting that Michael Broom creates this spooky character UP SIDE DOWN.
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens 
Wacom Cintiq Tablet
Crumble, Crackle and Burn: 60 Stunning Textures for Design & Illustration
Facial Expressions Babies to Teens and Facial Expressions by Mark Simon
Marie Antoinette Action Figure with Removable Head
I started this painting last week and I thought I would show it for this week’s illustration Friday along with a new tutorial. It is for a new book I am working on (more on that later)
This Heat is Killing My Hair
frizzy hair is painter’s specialty. Here is a close up of the witch’s hair.
Once you have the brush giving you just the right amount of kinky wildness then save it for a later use. You can do this by selecting “Save Variant” where your brush is located. Name it something useful like “horse tail” so you will remember what it looks like.
You can use frizzy brushes for not just hair, but also to give your paintings an erratic, full of energy, texture. For example, I increased both the Feature and the Random setting and painted the night sky with this brush to give some crazy looking fog to the sky. (right) I think this brush has some tension to it. It’s not the kind of brush you would want to use when painting a sweet meadow scene of hopping bunnies, but it works for a graveyard.
A few weeks ago, my husband gave me an Amazon Kindle to amuse me during my recoup after surgery. When I first held this strange, paperback-sized device my immediate reaction was – “why would I want to read a book on an electronic device followed by…you spent what on that thing ????”
First we start with a sketch. Watercolors are the only medium where I will start on a white piece of paper. I find this utterly terrifying because you cannot set a cool or warm mood with the color of your paper. But just like in traditional watercolor, the brightness of the paper becomes your base color.
The digital watercolor brushes work much more efficiently. You can select one of the digital watercolor brushes from the brush menu by clicking on the small arrow next to the brush.
Next you want to choose a kind of digital watercolor brush and customize it to your needs. I prefer to start with the “Wash Brush.” The real magic in this brush is controlling the “Wet Fringe” and “Diffusion.” In this sample, the left doodle has a Wet Fringe of 100% with a 0 Diffusion. You can see that this creates a brush strokes that goes on wetter because you can really see the color accumulating on the stroke edges. On the right the Diffusion is kept at 0 and the Wet Fringe is 0. This creates a smoother almost marker feel. To me, it looks more like what you can get out of Photoshop which I personally think looks more "digital."
In this next example, the Wet Fringe is kept at 100% and the Diffusion is put at 20. This creates a very watery fluid brush which might not be the right brush for objects, but would look fabulous as a watery backgrounds.
Another tip: Use lots of layers with watercolors. You can create a new layer in the same way that you do in photoshop by clicking on the small right triangle and selecting “new layer.” If you paint each wash on a seperate layer then you can lower the opacity as you go to and slowly build color. I drop the layer once I get it looking how I want it. (You drop the layer by clicking on the arrow to the right and selecting “Drop.” The drop is the equivalent to the "merge down" command in Photoshop)
For a limited time only! Get your Dr. Horne's Electric Belt. (Batteries sold separately).
With this week's topic, I had a childhood memory of how I used to always wonder where the seeds from a flower would plant themselves when you blew them into the wind. (I know...totally corny!) I am sure my neighbors could have done without me blowing weeds into their yard.Here is a quick experimentation with Painter's digital watercolor brushes and Hard Pastel on Rice paper. I have not used Painter's watercolors in awhile and I had forgotten how wonderful the brushes are for showing fluid movement. (the seeds blowing out of the dandelion are the "Spatter Water" brush.) When I worked traditonally, I could never control my spatters and would always end up with a muddy mess.
If people like this experimentation then maybe I will do a tutorial next on painter's watercolor and pastels tools. Let me know if you are interested...
As with most people, I love the image of Mona Lisa and her enigmatic smile. But it has always bugged me that the woman is missing eyebrows. I love a good full brow as seen in my header image above. As a child, I used to draw brows on Mona Lisa’s face (still doing it!) Later, I discovered that plucking eyebrows was not in fashion until years after Mona Lisa was painted and I was left wondering…where did her eyebrows go?
In this tutorial, I am going to show how to use Photoshop styles to create depth and as a base for your paintings. Styles sort of get a bad rap because most designers and illustrators think of those glass buttons that the mac folks made so popular a few years ago. I remember every client was asking for “glass buttons” during that time and styles started to make me peevish too. But they do have their uses. Photoshop styles helped me whip out the name plate in last week’s tutorial without much fuss.
2. Next, we are going to create rounded circles jetting out from the square. Select the eclipse tool in the tool bar. We don’t need to create a separate shape here. It will be much easier to edit as one path. So to do this we will go to the top bar in photoshop and select the compound path option (figure 1)
3. Next, hold down the shift key and draw a circle to the left side of our square (figure 2). (holding the shift key constrains the proportions of the circle)
Hold down first the alt key and then the shift and drag the left circle over to the right.
(The alt key makes a duplicate and the shift key makes sure that the second circle is aligned with the first). You will now have one fully editable shape. (figure 4)
Drop Shadow:
If you want a rougher metal texture then you may want to play around with the pattern styles too.
Elizabethan ruffs often required as much as 8 yards of fabric to create. The material was heavily starched and the folds were created with a hot iron called a poking stick, similar to modern curling irons. Figure A. would be heated in the fire and Figure B. would be warmed inside Figure A. Next, the poking stick would be placed inside the starched folds (figure C). The more elaborate ruffs were decorated with lace and bead work and also supported with an object called a Supportasses (Fig. 720). With 8 yards of heavily starched fabric, ruffs must have been extremely heavy. And we complain about high heels!
Once I created one section of her collar, I dragged the entire shape into the brush palate. I selected “pattern brush” for the type of brush. Name your new brush something that makes sense. You now have a new brush created in your brush library.
Next week, we reach the pinnacle of pure laziness. I am going to demonstrate how to use the style palate in Photoshop to avoid doing any painting. I used styles to create the gold marker plates. It took 60 seconds instead of hours painting metal reflections and shadows. 
