The Pinoy Artist

I learned a couple of painting techniques today.

Type of Block-ins
1. Value
2. Complementary
3. Color
4. Lights and Shadows
5. Direct

This is from the book "Capturing the Seasons in Oil". It is a pretty good book. Buy it.

Another book that I think is worth buying is "Watercolor Success!: 52 Essential Lessons for Creating Great Paintings"

In this book I learned about painting forms first then add the textures later. Its author also talks about design elements with respect to painting composition.

More on Texturing

Another lesson I learned today, from my thinking, during my long walk this afternoon. I think it is better to learned painting buy studying traditional painters rather than digital painters.

Digital painters use a lot shortcuts like textured brushes or textured layers. This isn't necessarily bad if you know what you are doing.

But if you are just learning, you might use this tools or shortcuts randomly. Just experimenting until you arrive at something that you think is good.

But if you go the traditional route, you will have to think, how did the old traditional painters achieve textures just by using ordinary brushes.

There is no overlay layer in traditional painting. You cannot also load a custom image to use as a brush. So it is evident that they painted this textures manually - using brushwork techniques, a knife, a sponge, or spray.

After learning how they do it manually, you will have a better appreciation of digital textures.

You will also find that you don't really need a lot of texture images.  You will find yourself using just a few to help you achieve the effects you want.

Just a quick sketch for practice. I used Blender to make the basketball goal and hoops because it is a lot faster to determine the perspective of objects in a 3D software. I then painted over the goal in Paint Tool Sai.

The character, the clouds, and the sky were originally painted with Paint Tool Sai.

You can do this piece using Gimp. It is just that Sai has better blending brushes.

Blending modes is actually Gimp's weakness. It is very limited. If you want to achieve the effects that could be done in other painting software you would have to work harder.

This one of the things I have been busy with lately - TShirt Design. You can buy this t-shirt at this link : Cat Fish T-Shirt Black.

And you can also check my other print designs at Cafepress.com/2DPoetry.

A few of the things we could do to earn with our drawings are:

1. Take on commission jobs.
2. Sell illustrations in microstock websites
3. Sell shirt designs