Painter's Digital Watercolors

In this tutorial, I am going to cover the basics of using Painter’s digital watercolor brushes using last week’s experiment. I have to say up front that if you are looking for watercolor inspiration then this is not the place. I find watercolors one of the hardest mediums to work in and probably my least favorite. But people who make the switch to digital painting usually like Painter’s watercolor brushes the best.

Digital watercolors do allow you to experiment in a way that allows more freedom than traditional watercolor medium. (Those of you that have worked in watercolors know how unforgiving it can be.) The digital medium works the same as the traditional medium so I am not going to go into any watercolor techniques.

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.

There are two types of watercolor brushes in Painter. There are the regular old “watercolor brushes” that have been in Painter for ages and there are the “Digital Watercolor brushes”. The watercolor brushes are better for sweeping in washes of color in backgrounds, but you will need tons of memory to use these without grinding your machine to a halt. 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 interesting brush is the “Wet Eraser” under the same brush grouping. This brush allows you to easily correct your mistakes with literally a wet erase. Something that is difficult to do with traditional watercolors. (Note: the wet eraser only works on layers. Once you drop your layer down you will want to go back to the regular eraser.)

At this point, the painting just has some light washes. I like a little texture so I always go over my watercolor paintings with some pastels using different textured paper. And that is what you can see in the final.

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)

I will cover Painter's pastel brush in another tutorial. I also plan to cover painting with a watercolor brush in Photoshop. The steps are a little less intuitive, but it can be done. Let me know if there is something in particular that you would be interested in seeing.

Illustration Friday: Electricity

For a limited time only! Get your Dr. Horne's Electric Belt. (Batteries sold separately).

btw, I will have a new tutorial up next week. I dislocated my shoulder while wearing my new vibrating belt. Long posts are a bit tricky right now.

Illustration Friday: Seeds

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...

A Bad Brow Job

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?

Now the mystery of the missing brow line is finally solved. Pascal Cotte, a French engineer and inventor, used a high-definition camera to discover the lost hair in the famous painting. Turns out that good old Mona got over plucked by either the ravages of time or a few overeager attempts to restore her image. You can read more about it here.

Painting with Style

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.

Here are the steps

1. Select the rounded rectangle tool from the Photoshop tool palette and set the radius to about 10. Pick some sort of goldish color. Click and drag to make a square with rounded corners.

figure 1
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)

figure 2

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)

4. Now we obviously want both sides to have the same size circles so we will select the path selection tool (figure 3) and select the circle that we already drew.

figure 3
Hold down first the alt key and then the shift and drag the left circle over to the right.

figure 4

(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)

5. Now the fun part. We can apply styles to create the depth. Hit the small “f” key at the bottom of your layers palate or double click on the right side of the layer. This opens up the styles palate. Styles are something that you really need to play around with to get the most out of them but I used the following settings for the plate:

Check the following Layer Styles:

figure 5
Drop Shadow:
Opacity 51, set to multiply, distance: 13 Size: 8
Bevel and Emboss: (see figure 5)
Satin: ( see figure 6)
Color Overlay :
Set to orange, Normal blend mode, 100%

figure 6

If you want a rougher metal texture then you may want to play around with the pattern styles too.

And when you are done, in the styles palette, click the small right button and select “save styles” (right). Now you can use it again for creating more metal plates.

New Blog and Site

I have a new blog and site up on gossip and rumors surrounding royal rulers. Check it out and let me know what you think:

The Raucous Royals and the Raucous Blog

Illustration Friday: Homage

This week’s illustration Friday topic of "homage" could apply to basically anything; music, food, cute animals…dirty socks (I’ve got my growing piles of laundry on my mind). This week I thought I would post a tutorial using Adobe Illustrator because I have not covered any tips in this program.



Elizabethan Ruffs

My homage will be to Elizabethan ruffs. For those of you that might not be familiar with the era, Elizabethan ruffs are the massive, wheel-like starched collars that required thousands of pins and a lot of patience to create. One of the more elaborate decorative collars can be seen in the famous Armada portrait. (left).






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!

For my next book, The Raucous Royals (due out in September), I wanted to portray Elizabeth in a similar wardrobe as the Armada portrait. This picture introduces the rumor that Mary Queen of Scots plotted to kill her cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth needed to look regal, but there is just no way that I was going to paint in all that intricate detail in the lace. For fine details like this Elizabethan collar, Adobe Illustrator can make dressing the queen a cinch.

Here are the steps:

1. I opened Adobe Illustrator and created a single section of the lace work using repetitive shapes and line work. This part is a bit time consuming, but not half as laborious as painting in her whole collar with a really thin brush. Plus, my hand is not that steady and I did want some uniformity in the design.
   
   
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. Next, I created a circle that would roughly be the circumference of Elizabeth’s collar.
   
   
4. Now the magic- select your circle and apple the newly created brush pattern by simply selecting it in the brush library. You should have something that looks like this:



5. Now select our ruff and hit copy (CTRL/CMD + C) and open Photoshop. We paste the ruff into Photoshop (CTRL/CMD + V) and select “smart object” (we want this to be a smart object so that we can resize it without loosing quality and also have the ability to edit it in the future.)



6. The next step is to mask out the center of the lace so that it is under the main ruff and encircles her head.
   
   
7. The last step is to apply a “Smart Sharpen” filter under the menu Filter/Sharpen/Smart Sharpen. Lower your fade amount in the highlight area. This last step is in important to force the white and black details to a higher contrast. We need to do this in any shape that is as intricate as this or the pattern will be too blurry.
   
   Note: We could have also distorted the collar to be smaller in the back and larger in the front, but I liked the flatness of the design in this case.

Voila…an intricate lace collar for Elizabeth that would have surely made Mary jealous.

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.


Source:
Norris, Herbert. Tudor Costume and Fashion, Dover Publications, Inc. New York, 1997
Picard, Liza. Elizabeth's London, St. Martin's Griffin, New York, 2003

Illustration Friday: Pet Peeves

This week's topic fits well with a painting that I have been working on. Lately, I feel like my memory is just not working like it used to. Whenever I am introduced to somone, the name just flies out of my head a second later.

So I have been trying this slightly different style....something more abstract and with not as many dark colors. The realism of some of my other work gets a little tedious.

Illustration Friday: HEAVY

I had a hard time choosing which “heavy” image to post for this week’s Illustration Friday. Sure…the circus fat lady is always a crowd pleaser, but big Babe Ruth has had her time in the limelight. Instead, I thought I would share some very heavy images from my next book, The Raucous Royals. This book is for kids of all ages who hated history. It is history with the juicy bits left in and debunks all the rumors, myths and scandals that have survived through the decades. One of the myths that always fooled me as a kid (and adult) was that Henry VIII was this rotund king storing acorns in his mouth. This image has been ingrained in my mind. Sure, good old Hank was not a looker in his old age, but in his younger day he was quite the ladies man. People from all over talked about his shapely legs and athletic physique. (Legs were especially important in Tudor times. If a guy had nice legs then he was considered a real hottie. Today, I would have to say that legs are the least looked at part of a man’s body.)

So to follow along with the cliché image of big fat Henry, I painted him in this typical eating a turkey leg pose.

Here are some of the stages of the image.


1. Initial Sketch
I first drew a sketch in good old pencil and paper and then scanned it in.


2. Base Colors
I then brought it into Painter and began to flesh out the colors using the Real Bristle Oil brushes. I chose Curled Wood Shavings as my paper to give a slight texture. I hate this stage because it looks very “digital”. I can see those digital gooey paint strokes. (Everyone who has worked with both traditional and digital oils knows what I am talking about)


3. Texture added
At the next stage, I increased the Feature (Found on the top of your screen under the brush controls) of my Real Round Oil brush so that the brush strokes start to show through. Now it is starting to look more like the oil medium. I also at this point added in Henry’s fur collar with the Furry Brush (it is under the Fx brushes). I love the furry brush because I am inherently lazy and the brush creates very realistic looking fur without having to vary the size of your oil brush.


4. Fabric Details
At the next stage, I started to add in all the fabric details on his robe. I love dressing historical figures. For Henry, I researched Tudor fabrics and scanned in the fabric patterns that I planned to use.

Here are the Steps to create the fabric details in the front of his coat.

1. I scanned in the pattern that I planned to use. You can see an example of the Tudor pattern that I used here.


2. Next, I opened this scan in Photoshop and used the Levels command to force the dark grey background to black. To do this select Image/Adjustments/Levels and select the black picker (below). Once you have selected the black picker, click on the darkest area of the image. You should see all the dark areas go to black.
   
   
   
3. This is great but now we need to inverse the image so that all the black areas are white and the white areas are black. To do this, go to Image/Adjustments/Inverse.
   
4. Almost there. Now select the whole image (Ctrl/Cmd + A) and go to Edit/Define Brush Preset.


5. Now we have created a pattern brush that can be “stamped” on to Henry’s robe. Just select our new brush from the list of brushes, create a new layer, and then click once where you want the fabric pattern to go. In this case, I had to do this a few times because he has rows of stitching.
   
6. The last step is to bend it to the fold of the clothing using the Warp tool. (Edit/Transform/Warp).
   
   Voila a royal pattern for our portly king.

I used the same technique on Henry’s sleeve. Here is an up close detail.

The last step is to create a crackle- like pattern so that it looks like a truly aged oil painting. Here is an up close detail of the crackle affect.


5. Crackle it
To do this, I selected the Square Pastel brush and one of the Crackle papers from Painters list of papers. You want to make sure to choose a contrasting color so that the crackles show through. You also have to make sure the grain is low enough for the pastel to sit on top of the paper. You can find the Grain controls on the top bar. I set mine at 8%. And always do this on another layer so you can take some away if you get a little crackle carried away. This is where I love digital painting because it gives you the freedom to experiment without all those nasty crackle medium fumes.

If you have any technical questions about this process then feel free to email me at info@CarlynBeccia.com. And watch for The Raucous Royals (Houghton Mifflin) in September this year!

IF: Garden

Here is some wallpaper art that I made a few years ago. I did this one with Painter's impasto and oil brushes on black wood grain. The girl and animals are a bit boring, but I like the look of bright fall colors on black. I might attempt this technique again, but with more interesting characters. It is such a challenge to create depth using only color and size because black flattens everything.

2007 Golden Kite Honor for Picture Book Illustration

I got very good news this week that I have to share with the 3 (ok maybe 4) people who read my blog. I found out that Who put the B in the Ballyhoo? was winner of this year's 2007 Golden Kite Honor for Picture Book Illustration. It's such an honor to be recognized by SCBWI. Check out the winners.

And congratulations to Yuyi Morales for being the Golden Kite winner for Little Night. I was fortunate enough to meet Yuyi a few years ago at the SCBWI Los Angeles conference and she gave me my first ever critique. It was the best one I ever got and Yuyi really inspired me to clean up my act and get a stronger portfolio together.

Multiples: Daisey and Violet Hilton

I thought I would participate in my first ever illustration friday post with the topic of multiples. This painting of Daisey and Violet Hilton is one of my favorites from my book. Throughout their lives, Daisey and Violet attracted drama times two. Together they went through marriages, divorces, business failures and even had brief stints as Hollywood stars.

Daisey and Violet were born in England in 1908. Born as conjoined twins, they were attached to the hip and buttocks. They toured as sideshow acts from the age of 3 but our best known for their roles in the movies Freaks and Chained for Life. (Freaks was panned by critics and Chained for Life was banned in many places due to its content. )

Their marriages were about as successful as their movie careers. Daisey was married to vaudeville dancer Harold Estep for an everlasting two weeks. And Violet married her dance partner, James Walker "Jim" Moore, but got divorced a few years later.

In 1952, the Hilton twins opened a hamburger stand called The Hilton Sisters' Snack Bar. But that too was doomed to failure for people did not want to be served food by two "freaks". Sadly, the two sisters died penniless in their trailer from the Hong kong Flu.

Thus, I have painted the Hilton twins as two grumpy, young brats gravely unhappy with their role as side show novelty acts.

Here is a far more cheery vaudeville poster advertising their act as young girls. As mentioned in my book, they sang, dance and played instruments as part of their show.

Source:
Taylor, James & Hotcher, Kathleen. Shocked and Amazed! On and Off the Midway. The Lyons Press, 2002

Ballyhoo Tip of the week….ok maybe for the next few weeks

I have been trying to get in the habit of posting a digital painting or writing tip each week. But what is that saying about the road to hell….something about it paved with good intentions? Every week might just be a little too ambitious with my schedule.







So here is the tip for this week…

Many of you have probably already upgraded to the new Painter X And if you have not then here is one of my favorite new features. It is called the Divine Proportion tool.

Divine proportion in art is sometimes referred to as the Golden Proportion, Golden Number or if you are a real geek, the Fibonacci Series. The golden number is basically 1.6180339887 otherwise known as phi. Inside of the big rectangle is another rectangle that has an exact ratio of 1:1.618. Inside of that rectangle is another rectangle with a perfect ratio of 1:1.618. Probably the most famous example of The Golden Ratio used in art is Leonardo's Mona Lisa The Golden Ratio can be found in Mona Lisa’s enigmatic face. Shown here:

I have always been fascinated with the idea of Math in art and always try to be aware of planning a composition so that that main action does not fall into a dead zone. The example above is the art I created for the 2007 SCBWI Publication Guide. (available to members at www.scbwi.org) Because this art was created to fit into a small space, I am going to use the divine proportion tool from edge to edge.

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Go to Window/Show Divine Proportion. The tool’s interface with look like this:


Step 2: Check the box for “Enable Divine Proportion” at the very top.

Step 3: You can now alter your Divine Proportion tool to match your composition. In this example, I selected a vertical orientation for my divine proportion because I want the eye to be carried up the stairs but the focus to be on the little girl’s expression. (In my original sketch she did not fall in this location so I moved her.

Here is an example with the image screened back so you can better see it:


You can also change the rotation and the scale of the divine proportion by tinkering with the controls below the orientation. In most cases, you will not want your divine proportion to go from edge to edge. This image is postcard size and there is not a lot of empty space so the viewer takes the whole thing in at once. In a larger painting this will not be the case.

So of course, I started to wonder if other artists use Divine Proportion in their art. Here is an illustration from the super talented Loren Long and a good example of when you would move the Divine proportion tool.

In this painting the viewer would not take in the dark space in the back. It is intentional dead space – sort of like an area for the viewer to rest before they take in the main action. In music, we would call it the build up. So if you move the Divine Proportion tool to encompass only the man then you will see that it falls perfectly into a golden ration.

You move the Divine Proportion tool by selecting it in your main tool bar. It looks like this: When you move your cursor over your painting, your cursor will turn into a hand so you can position your Divine Proportion guides manually.

In Loren's painting, the first main rectangle encompasses the sweeping motion. The second rectangle encompasses the perfect hand to elbow to face ratio, and then the smaller rectangles encompass the concentrated look on the man’s face.

The composition is perfectly planed. Now let’s take a moment to hate him, but I suspect that Loren is not conscientiously aware of the math behind his art. Most artists do this naturally. For the rest of us….there’s the Divine Proportion tool. Loren has a New Book out now that is stunning as always.

But if all of this makes your head hurt then there is also the good old rule of thirds to go by. In the box below the Divine Proportion tool there is an option to turn on a layout grid. The layout grid will at least tell you if your main action is falling into the thirds of your painting. You can find this option here:


If you would like to learn more about how Math works in art then I recommend Rhythmic Form in Art by Irma A. Richter

I hope this tips help. If anyone is interested in how to do the same steps in Photoshop (not quite as easy) then please comment below and I will make that next week’s tutorial.

Digital Painting - Conference Notes

Thank you to everyone who came to my class on Digital Painting. I know the experience level of the attendees ranged from computer shy to expert but hopefuly everyone got something out of it.

For anyone who did not get the conference handouts, I have a link where you can download them here:

http://www.carlynbeccia.com/blog/notes.pdf

I know I also said that I would post the goodies cd. Well....I have a terrible habit of leaving something wherever I go. (I go through about 12 pairs of gloves a winter) After the conference, I left a small blue case which had 3 small portable hard drives. One of those hard drives contained the goodies material. You would think I would have this on my computer right? I do, but not in the organized fashion that I did on those portable hard drives.

So if anyone found a small blue case, PLEASE email me (info@carlynbeccia.com) because I am dreading having to reorganize everything again.

More Ballyhooed Books

I was so happy to finally get ABC Safari By Karen Lee in the mail today. I love ABC books but this one is really stunning! Each letter introduces a new exotic creature from the jungle in beautifully rendered (I think) watercolors. The way Karen paints is sort of like soft cubism where each animal is built up with washes of transparent color.
My favorite is of course the Vulture under V but those of you with less macabre taste may be more drawn to the cheetah that leaps off the page or the angelic looking ape cradling a flower.

My nephew's favorite restaurant is the Rainforest Cafe because of all the wild animals. Next time he asks to go there, I can avoid their very nasty food by bribing him with this book!

A Ballyhooed Book

5 book signings, 3 library visits and 8 school visits….in 3 weeks! I have not even had a chance to announce the release of my first book, Who put the B in the Ballyhoo? It’s been said that your first book is like a having a baby, so as a proud parent I couldn’t resist taking a much needed breath to talk about the aspects of the book that I am most proud of.

People have asked me many times how I researched the book. The short answer is that I poured over hundreds of circus posters, placards and broadsides to match the language and style of vintage circus posters. Then, I dug deeper to uncover the history behind these unbelievably talented circus stars. For those that love circus lore you will be familiar with many of the phrases in the book such as “Starling and Stupendous”, “Combined Shows” “New acts that Amaze and Delight” and my personal favorite, “Important Engagement” (It sounds deliciously Victorian!)

But after reading the book to over a 1000 kids this month, I am also proud of the sidebars that give a glimpse of circus life without giving so much detail that the reader’s attention span is lost. Each sidebar has about 3- 4 lines of fascinating factoids about some of the circus’s most celebrated stars. When I first took on this book, I was not convinced it was necessary. I thought kids couldn’t possible care about how much weight Louis Cyr could lift. Luckily, my always wise editor convinced me that it would add another layer to the book. I now find kids are actually far more interested in these factoids than even the art.

But sometimes the things that we are most proud of are not the ones that your critics and readers embrace. They are the private passions that only the artist or author could possibly care about. For me, that passion is the typography and design elements that give each page its own character. I have been a designer for over 10 year now and typography is in my blood. My grandfather set the type for his hardware store. I still have his Speedball books that show the careful way that he traced every letterform and still smell of his favorite tobacco. I know kids, adults and certainly book critics could care less whether I used a decorative art nouveau font or the bolder, 19th century slab type that reflected a nation facing industrialization and the rise of the emerging advertising genre. (yawn) And no, I never point out to kids how some pages have type with bracketed serifs that later evolved to letterforms of contrasting weight popular at the turn of the 20th century. I can just picture their eyes glazing over. People whom have seen the book always comment on how different each page looks.

I never met my grandfather, but I know he would have been proud.