Moving onto new and exciting bits

Put the flag to rest for now, after my disastrous attempts with a different Wacom tablet set-up:

I'm so impatient. I had the time to work on this after a long absence, and I got bored in the first 10 minutes. But, instead of giving up altogether, I decided it was time for the buildings in the background. And yes, here I used vector shapes and gradient fills to create the base. I figured that it's pointless trying to draw a straight line by hand on a computer. Mike and Leo would agree, I'm sure :)

Now I'm excited all over again!

Pizza Express birthday email

Ok so this is not something I've made / am making, but it is highly relevant to all the many hours I've spent in my digital life trying to get HTML emails to display properly. I just got this from Pizza Express - my birthday is coming up soon, and they sent me a happy birthday email. When I opened it, it looked like this:

Cute enough,but then I clicked 'display images' out of habit, and instantly realised that the image above was built using tables, with the image to be loaded cut up into a thousand little pieces to fit into the layout. As someone who has worked exhaustively with tables, I know that the cute pixel image above probably took wayyyy longer than the email with images:

which, incidentally, also has my name on it :) I like it, it makes me happy, and I will probably go to Pizza Express for my birthday...

Highly frustrating

Downtime in a new office, so it's back to New York. Started where I left off on the bottom right bit of detail, but soon got very tired of it and was just messing it up, so I moved to a new section. In this office the computers are set up with minimum flexibility to avoid virus downloads and other illegal software and add-ons being installed and clogging up the machines. This means I can't install new tablet driver software, which means my Wacom is functioning like a mouse. A designer I know from a few years ago used to find it odd that I have my pen mapped to the screen, and couldn't work in it. ASfter attempting to fill in some time here painting NYC, I absolutely cannot understand how he works with it in mouse mode. I've hit Undo so many times I might as well be working backwards, because the point of reference keeps shifting, so it's not like painting IRL anymore.

Giving up now, although it was nice to be painting Times Square now that I've been there :)

Working it

So I don't get a lot of time to work on this, in between freelancing and all my other projects, but when I can I try to really devote some detail-time, rather than just rushing through it... I'm getting there, but I'm doing a lot of re-working.

It's also harder than I thought!

Discovered that I can't get away with random blobs of colour for all the people, especially not in the foreground... a) I wasn;t getting the right overall colour, and b) blobs don't look like people. So I created a colour palette of the main colours (I 'mixed' them myself!) and so limited my palette to the tones that would match the dusk sky in the final painting.

I also gathered up my resolve, banished my laziness and zoomed in to do some detail on the crowd in front.

While maintaining my casual, Impressionist excuse for impatience, of course ;-)

Maybe it is art....

I got bored of the people, so started on the billboards. I love how the medium allows for so much light. It's like the best of watercolour, oil and acrylic combined. Without any of the mess.

Also markers and pastels :)

Is this art? (part2)

Then, somewhere between trying to hand-paint (read Wacom tablet and pen) the circular holes of the Francis P. Duffy memorial and worrying about whether I could use the text tool for the inscriptions on it, I decided, f*ck it - this is not a homework assignment. I'm having fun. So I left the debate over art with teh memorial and moved on to the areas I originally thought would be cool to work on.

I desaturated the crowd so I could splash away with my paintbrush without having the original image dictate colour. Yes, I added a Bevel effect to the paint so it would look Impasto. Like I had squeezed the blobs of colour straight out of the tubes. I am now making up the rules as I go along...

I reckon if Van Gogh had a PC with Photoshop he would take full advantage of the medium...

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Is this art?

So I have some time on my hands, because I often freelance at agencies that book me in for weeks at a time, and then sometimes don't have enough work to cover all 8 hours of the day. I can't do a lot in these situations, because I'm almost always on computers with the bare minimum for my job, and I don't carry all my other project files with me all the time. Dropbox is pretty useful in these situations.

Anyway, mostly I have Photoshop and the Internet. And an appetite for creativity that won't quit. Today I started a new Photoshop project, but I'm not sure if it qualifies as art. You see, I'm lazy when it comes to certain things like drawing from memory. Lazy or perhaps just not confident enough that it will turn out looking right, and then I will have wasted time on it, when what I actually want to do is play around with colours and shadows and lighting and all the other cool effects you add on once the basic structure looks good. Colouring in, really.

The question that keeps going through my head while I'm doing this is: "is it art?"

Here is my base picture. It almost looks like a painting already, which is what drew me to it in the first place.

I'll be honest, I don't even really know where I'm going with it. Nevertheless, I've started copying out the shapes and thinking about the colours. (Maybe this is what the comic book colour team does?)

My art education kicked in and prompted me tostart at the back, so I could do layers towards the front. Then I realised this isn't paint, and it would work better to start from the front, so that the shape panels wouldn't block colour from behind.

At some point, while deciding how best to recreate the granite texture on the memorial stone in front, I decided that, to qualify as something that isn't just a copy of the original, I would have to insert some traditional art. So I made the tentative decision to avoid the Photoshop Gradient tool, and, after using the Noise filter, I decided I wouldn't use that again either.

Or the Bevel and Emboss, or Drop Shadow. Hmmm. My laziness safety switch just tripped.