Thomgirl's Digital Ruminations

Yeah, I did research on those as well, but Painter sort of fell into the realm of saddling between my love affair with PS and being a more reasonable investment. Our insurance also cut us a check for my laptop's demise which more than covered the cost of the new software, but looking long term I knew I needed to swap over to using my PC instead of staying with Mac. My PC I can take out dead parts, put in new and rebuild myself keeping costs low. Not to mention I get to work with two monitors instead of a laptop screen now. Now that the move is done, it feels good!

Hooray! Thomgirl's sketching again.

And now that you're diving in with Corel Painter I hope we'll be seeing some lovely, painterly brush strokes in those elegant faces.

Welcome back.

Good to see ya back to sketching.

Thanks all! It's good to be back!

@Valence: I'm hoping so! I'm still playing around with it, so my work is tending to still stay in the realm of pastels, graphite, and markers, but I'm trying to play a bit too with different stuff. It's pretty nuts zooming on the work and seeing the graphite lines actually 'dust' on the 'paper' and the roughness of the pastels until you blend them. It's really cool! At the very least, the program is encouraging me to work much looser which is good and with only 2 layers at the moment.

That pic's developing fast and developing well.

My own fleeting Corel Painter experience was with the free trial and then the cut-down cheapo version (that I still have installed but never now use.) I found it a bit fiddly with too many intimidating settings to tweak but despite that there were two things I loved about it. The Just-Add-Water brush, which was a beautiful soft way to blend, and the Impressionist brush that created some lovely effects that I've never managed to recreate in any other software. But I do keep trying in ArtRage.

Welcome back Thomgirl! The new ones looking fantastic - did you use a ref for that? She seems very familiar.

@ Atto: I am using a ref for the pose/lighting, but the face, hair, attire have been developed on my own impression of what the character looks like to me. Still a ton of adjustments to make!

@Valence: Since I came from Photoshop, Painter doesn't feel too daunting. In a way, it feels more trimmed down compared to what I'm used to! But that's good, because I didn't use half the photomanip stuff that PS had anyways. The brushes are amazingly fun and behave much more 'realistically' than the ones in PS did. I could never get the darn painting brushes to work for me well in that, so I always stuck to chalks and airbrushes.

On the other side though, I'm having so much fun exploring this piece has sort of become a multi-media hodgepodge! All's good though and I know I'll make it work in the end.

I should be trying to finish up Minerva for the challenge, but I'm sorta having a bit of a 'come to terms' with myself. I feel like I have really strong sketches, but then I get to painting and they just... loose so much of what they started with. So I'm taking time to experiment with my 'style' and try and re-evaluate where my strengths are, where I'm weak, and find a system that works well. I'll be posting updates on what I mess around with. Maybe if I solidify something today with bringing my work to color, I can knock out Minerva before the end of the month. We'll see.

I hope you do. I haven't had time to get anywhere at all with my Minerva...

Laying down some color. I have a plan for this, I swear.