Digital Paintings One

These paintings are among the first of the digital paintings. They are done from imagination with a little help. One of the features of this artist is he has picked up and laid down his brush several times in life for varying periods. And each time of picking up, it has been necessary to work through beginner level work. Eventually the old skills have come back and they have sometimes been advanced.


	Earliest digital image I'll show here -- others are too pathetic. I seemed to feel the need for some wide-open spaces. Basically crap, but fun to do.


	Now this one took me a bit out of a state of slight boredom. Somewhere in this was a something I recognized as a tad deeper than the previous paintings -- not much, but something.


	Encouraged by the last painting, I tried this more elaborate painting. I used the capabilities of digital art more freely and found myself actually paying some attention to the process. Thought I'd like to wander about in this world a while.


	So far, all these landscapes began as simple pastel sketches, but soon were much modified using digital programs.


	While I enjoyed doing this one, I was a little frustrated. I had begun thinking about some new ideas...


	It seems I wanted some "physicality" to my abstract, some dimension and modeling, certainly color.


	This one surprised me -- what, a mixture of abstract and the prosaically real? But it did make me feel good when it was finished.


	This was a breakthrough for me, and wouldn't have been without my having done the previous abstractions. Now, I no longer felt restricted by the ideas I had not known were binding me. I could now be abstract about real subjects, and I could be realistic about abstract ones.


	I quickly applied what I had learned to a pastel sketch of an image in one of my mallard photos then made many modifications and elaborations.


	I rarely work from the images of others, but a news photo caught my eye. To isolate the image, I did a white chalk sketch of the part that interested me, and worked from that. During the longish digital manipulation of my scanned image, I tried to maintain and enhance the "chalkiness" of the image. This smaller version loses some of the detail of that chalkiness.

	* END OF DIGITAL PAINTINGS ONE *