Painting with Computers

My favorite thing right now is Painting with Computers, an online class at Foothill College in the Bay Area.  To take this class, I had to get Corel Painter and a Wacom tablet, both of which were completely new to me.  There's a pretty steep learning curve on Painter, and I've only just begun the ascent, but it's a cool program that allows you to do a tremendous number of artistic things.  Here's something I finished last week:

"Spooky" by Elise Wormuth
Link to Show Off Your Shot

Some people seem to think that if you're doing artwork on the computer, you just push a button and voila -- you have art.  But this image, which is a collage, took me hours and hours to do.  It's composed of three different photos of clouds, a sunset from one of my pictures, textures, trees I painted IRL in my watercolor class, silhouette images of wolves, etc.  And then some painting too -- shadows, the grasses in front, and so on.  I like the way it came out, and am looking forward to printing it out on textured paper.

It is true that Painter has "clone" and "autopaint" functions that do allow you to pretty much push a button, if you are not particularly interested in being creative, but that's not a whole lot of fun.  Our teacher introduced us to Karen Carr, a wildlife and natural history artist who does gigantic murals and whose works are in the Smithsonian, for one. Look at the link for her discussion of digital painting, and especially notice the series of pics in which she zooms in ever closer on a 25-foot mural, and you see the detail she includes in the full-size mural.  It's extremely detailed.  One mural she did for an Oklahoma museum took her 2000 hours!

   "Mustard Fields" by Elise Wormuth

This is one I did from a photograph I took -- not quite done, but I'm happy with the way it came out.  It's digital watercolor, and it was fun to do (if a little frustrating, because I'm such a noob).   

Have you ever worked in Painter?  If you have, I'd love to see what you're doing!  Have a great day --