GOING DIGITAL

I’ve dabbled with digital painting for a few years using Painter. I began with Painter 9 and progressed through upgrades to the current version Painter12.  Professional illustrators produce quite stunning images with Painter for a variety of applications. Painter though has a quite complex interface and it takes some time to appreciate and become familiar with many of its features.

My interest in it is as a means of exploring starting points that could be developed further by using traditional painterly techniques. An easy way to gain familiarity with the program is to explore the ‘auto painting’ feature. First copy a reference image into Painter and save it. Next open a new layer and start the autopainting tool. This will start to build up a clone of the reference image which in time would produce a clone of the reference source. The auto feature can be paused at any stage as the clone proceeds.

I’ve used a scan of a late pastel by Degas as the source reference and paused the process as a starting point for further development with Painter’s ‘Pastel Brushes.’ I don’t intend to do more work on it. The objective was to become familiar with methods that can be used with Painter.