The Woodland Series Intro: The Fountain of Grace and Elegance

I want to introduce the Woodland Series to you and the first piece in it. I want to create fantasy type landscapes using a combination of photomanipulation and digital painting. Each one will tell you a story. I'd encourage you to wonder what these pieces mean in particular to you. Do they remind you of a certain place? A dream? Some strange spiritual encounter? You decide.

Here is "The Fountain of Grace and Elegance." If you look closely at a big version of this piece which you can find here (click on the image to see a bigger one), you can see different textures and many different layers going in this mystical forest. Enjoy!

Close Up of "the ocean moves"

In the previous post, I briefly talk about how I wanted this piece to be impressionistic in order to show the movement of this powerful wave. Here, I want to show you what I mean by providing a high resolution close up portion of this piece.



You can see the entire version of this digital painting here.

The Making of "the ocean moves"

"the ocean moves" is the second piece in my Nautical Series. The first piece is "the ocean calls" which is of the conch shell. "the ocean moves" is entirely a digital painting done by a Wacom Intuos3 tablet using Corel Painter. Here is how I started and progressed in the painting to get the final result.

Step 1: I just wanted to cover the entire canvas to get the basic shape and movement of the wave. Thus, I used a large brush here.

Step 2: Here, I started to build upon what I had already laid down. I started to use a smaller brush to fill in some more detailed colors and highlights.

Step 3: Here, I really went in and started refining areas of the painting to give it a more solid shape and to really bring out the overall structure of the wave.

Step 4: Next, I went in and added more details to the wave since the structure and the shape of the wave was more apparent.

Step 5: After Step 4, I realized that the brush I was using was making the painting look blurry and not quite as impressionistic as I liked. I wanted the piece to be clear and yet impressionistic in order to really bring out the movement of the wave. Thus, I went over the entire painting with a different brush in Painter in order to make the wave more bold, impressionistic, and clear. I went right over top of the old brush strokes and began to fill in the wave with the same colors.

Step 6: Then, I refined what I did in step 5 to create the final piece. I realized that I didn't like the look of the sea mist at the top right hand corner so I scratched that. I wanted the focus to be more on the actual wave itself. I also used a blender brush to really get the feeling of the water mist that was coming off of this powerful wave. The final result:

To see a bigger version of "the ocean moves" go here and click on the painting.

Next Project

My next project will be a close up of an ocean wave to go in the nautical series. This will also be a digital painting. This will be the second in the series--the first being "the ocean calls" which you see below. When I am finished, I will update with the details!