Garden Faucet

It's been a busy summer and there have been lots of changes around here. I'm slowly getting back into a groove though. I've been doing some playing around with Photoshop. The original photo is nice but I think I like this better. Sometimes I'll play with photos to get ideas for paintings. I still will probably paint the faucet one of these days but the Photoshop experiment is definitely a keeper.

A Meerkat and a Template Change

Meerkat, 7 x 5 inches, acrylic on illustration board
© 2010 Sydney Harper

I changed my template to one of the new Blogger templates. I’ve read that it doesn’t work well with IE6, but I have no way to test that. So if you’re using IE6 and having problems, that’s why. I like the new template choices though!

I’m still painting from some Atlanta Zoo photos I took a while back. This is a little acrylic painting of a Meerkat. All of the meerkats there looked a little chunkier than the ones I’ve seen on TV. I don’t know if it’s just better fed than wild meerkats or a different, chunkier meerkat than the ones I’ve seen. It was perfect for a limited palette painting.

I’ve been filling in for someone who hasn’t been able to work lately. I don’t really mind but it has thrown me off schedule and limited my painting and drawing time. I’m slowly getting back on track.

A few links.

Here’s a few interesting links I’ve found lately.

The Dimensions of Color by David Briggs. If you’ve been wanting more technical information about color, this is your place. I plan to spend more time here. I like the 3 dimensional color space. There are also several interactive graphs that are helpful. (via James Gurney)

Harmony is an online drawing tool written in HTML5. It won’t work at all in Internet Explorer, so don’t even try. (via Drawn!) The Drawn! link has some example drawings and a video.

Flame is another online drawing tool I found on Drawn!. It does much as its name suggests. It is a flame-like brush tool that lets you select color, noise, softness and other characteristics.

ArtRage Paint Software

I have been playing with ArtRage software lately. I'm a rank beginner when it comes to digital art and I'm not even sure yet how much I like it. This program suits me perfectly. The registered version is a whole $25 US and they have a limited functionality demo that you can download. I discovered it from a mention on Nancy Stahl's blog (scroll down). For me it's an inexpensive way to try out digital art. It works best with a drawing tablet. I have an inexpensive Manhattan drawing tablet that works well. Drawing with a tablet is like starting over again though. I found I had to spend some time just developing my hand-eye coordination. There's some good information on starting with tablets at DaniDraws.com as well as a number of links to tutorials. It's been a fun experiment.