Sunday, March 02, 2014

Digital Drawing Day - Food

I chose the theme "Food" for this week's digital drawing. I had plans to do something interesting and complex, like a sandwich or a piece of pizza—something really challenging, but when I got down to a looming deadline I went for the fridge and pulled out the carton of eggs I just purchased. June's still life is a little more diverse, but I think she went for the simple solution too! Oh well, simple can sometimes be the most difficult to lift above the realm of the trite. Did we do it? I will leave that to you to decide...

June


Peppery Still Life:
Android tablet, Photo for scale and proportions, ArtFlow and New Trent
stylus, transferred to Photoshop, then Art Rage on PC, mouse as stylus.


Terry

Eggs
For the eggs in the bowl I found it incredibly difficult to draw nice, smooth oval eggs. I really should have drawn each egg on a different layer and then merged them, as I kept messing up the edges of one as I worked on another. Mental note taken for future. After I finished the group of eggs I tried just a single egg to see if I could get a smoother oval shape.  Both of these reminded me of the importance of shadows. The eggs looked like floating balloons until the shadows were added under them.  My favorite way of adding shadows is on a layer inserted between the foreground and the background. Then I use the airbrush tool to put in a soft shadow, then adjust the opacity of the shadow layer until it looks right.

iPad, Sketch Club app, New Trent Arcadia stylus

Vicki Miller, in Australia, is following along with our challenge and sent me her still life.

Check out her blog for her comments about working on this.

note: I swear June and Vicki were looking at the exact same banana!

Next week's theme: Your favorite tool, kitchen or otherwise

4 comments:

  1. What I think is amazing about this is that you can clearly see 'the hand of the artist'. Or maybe I really mean which artist's hand has done each piece. I don't know Vicki's work. But June's is clearly done by June, if you would compare her paintings. and Yours is clearly done by you if you would compare work such as your little tea bowls and so on.

    Perhaps instead it is the 'eye of the artist'? because you both will choose or discard the tools and programmes that will produce what you have in your own mind.

    I think this is especially noticeable as you become familiar with the tools and programmes. It would be interesting to compare something like work from near the beginning to work from near the end of this experiment.
    Sandy in the UK

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  2. Thanks, terry. I love your eggs, they look so dimensional and almost like an acrylic painting. I also love the background you put in. You are always full of new ideas!
    June's sill life does have a banana in exactly the same place doesn't it I would love to know how she blended the colours. The pepper looks so real! and the background looks like oil paint.

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  3. Vicki, hey hi. I love your still life -- and you did fabric, in folds and waves. I am blown away! I also like the way you set your materials on the canvas plane -- with the black and the white allowing the canvas to go on and on. And I'm trying hard to learn about shadows from Terry. I think I shall force myself to remember her tip -- sounds just right. When I got just about to the end of my process, in ArtRage (without my wacom working), I picked the airbrush. And that helped everything blend in --it's like a glaze -- it pulls things together. I think it made the pepper work better and it saved the tangerine. I struggle with placement on the "canvas", although I'm not sure why. I make the canvas smaller on the screen and what not, but still struggle. In part it's because my camera scaling and the canvas default size aren't the same, which I should deal with. Next time I'm going to work on that.

    So we can learn together. Thanks Vicki. Thanks Terry. Tra-la-la!

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  4. These are all lovely in their very own way, showing the unique perspective of each artist. Great ideas, too. I never would have thought about inserting a shadow between the layers.

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