Volkswagen Outback Thunderclouds half done digital oil

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Australian outback art gallery where old cars come to die. Done in ArtRage on my Mac. For anyone who wants to digitally mimic traditional painting, e.g. oils, water colour, on Mac or Windows, I recommend ArtRage over Corel Painter. I have both, and I find that ArtRage, as it specialises in doing just this one thing and doing it well, does it better than Painter. It's also considerably cheaper. There is ArtRage for iPad as well, and you can swap paintings from one to the other, i.e. start on the iPad and finish on your main computer.

I confess to tracing the basic outlines of this one, especially the Volkswagen, as I lost my ability for sketching out the proportions of things thanks to the brain damage caused by the Encephalitis I had when I was younger. (Well, I was never brilliant at it, but I could do it if I put my mind to it.)

Regards, Lachlan

I used to use Art Rage and also Painter but much prefer Painter - funny how different we all are. But your old VW Beetle is coming right along. You have chosen the colors well - greens are notoriously difficult, the window reflections are super and the sky looks ominous. My only crit would be the scribbles in the sky area as I'm not sure what they are or why they are there.

As for tracing, I'm not one of these uptight, art legalists who say tracing is the ultimate sin. I got over that when an art instructor handed out tracings of the same scene to be painted to about 10 of us and when the session was over, he got back 10 totally different paintings. I can draw it if I can see it (not from memory or imagination so much though) but there are times when I feel my time could be better spent painting. Not only that, but I normally paint over any lines I have down pretty early on anyway.

This looks so spontaneous. I like paintings that have zest. This is really good!

Hello Jan,

I find all the possibilities of Painter rather overwhelming, but the main thing is, I really like impasto and ArtRage does it so well. Actually, Art Set Pro does it slightly better, more randomly and realistically at least, but it's only on iPad unfortunately.

Those scribbles are artefacts of my still not having got the hang of looseness in computer graphics terms, and thinking I can delete, erase or cover up anything, and forgetting to use layers. I can't get rid of them now. They were there to sketch out the general outlines of the clouds ... sigh. Oh well, another learning experience.

Faisal, I really, really hope I can keep that spontaneity as I continue with it, and also that I know when to stop. I tend to get nitpicky and over-controlling at some point, and then the spontaneity is impossible to retrieve. I was trying to think of it not as painting per se, not yet anyway, but just as a basic blocking in before painting proper. Maybe I should do just 'blocking in' and not 'painting' as such, in my head at least, and stop there. It would keep me loose, if nothing else!

Lachlan

Now that I think about it and look at it properly, I've got more than half a mind to leave it as it is, except for tidying it up at the front a bit. Or maybe at least save this version and carry on with another version so if I ruin it at least I've got this one. What do people think? Will it do if I finish the headlights, clean up the jagged front edge and a few other bits and bobs? The only reason I stopped there was that I had a very old art tablet (Intuos 3) and didn't have an art pen so I couldn't control the direction of brush strokes, so I was going mad trying to achieve certain brush effects and eventually gave up. Maybe it's lucky …

Lachlan

In this version I've mostly got rid of those squiggles which Jan reminded me of, and which I myself had given up on, by using a particular palette knife which I hadn't tried. I created a rather nice watercolour effect in the process, and apart from completing the telephone lines and filling in most of the empty bits I've left it loose, as I said I would try to ...

And in this version I finished it off a bit more, and put in highlights where I think it needed them (though maybe by doing that I destroyed the bland, baked effect of sun coming from absolutely everywhere). I tried not to let it lose all its life, but I don't know if I succeeded. I like the melted effect it's got, which I achieved through careful use of that same palette knife, but I feel there's an inconsistency in style that wasn't there before; the washy watercolour/thinner sky and the thicker paint on the building, plants, water tank, bits of the car etc. though, I'm coming to like that. I'm so new to painting that I don't know what I like yet. I'm still feeling my way.

Lachlan

P.s. I did put an accent of a deeper red where those bits of orange are around the front door, to add a bit of a point of colour, but it looked wrong for some reason so I backed it off a bit to orange again. Maybe it took away from the Volkswagen being the centre of attention ... I don't know. Any ideas why, anyone? I think I really need to learn a bit of art theory!

Should there be more colours in it than just orange and green? They're complementary and they're both desert dull, and the green of the sky matches that of the plants, and the orange of the soil matches that of the buildings, though that is no coincidence I suspect, but I only just noticed all this. I suppose it makes for good artistic balance or something. I'm going by instinct here. I really need to learn some art theory. Have I said that before?

On going away and then coming back and looking again at both, I'm really noticing a loss of depth, or the third dimension, in this third version. The first and second versions had a real 'forward' drive of the direction of the thunderclouds and the perspective and the driveway and the direction the Volkswagen is facing, and that all hits you in the face, and in the third version that is somehow gone and I don't know what I did to destroy it. It looks all flat and dull. If I had done that in a real live painting with real paints I would be pretty upset right now. This is a learning experience in more ways than one.

Just posting pics up here and critiquing them myself while you're all asleep 'up over' is almost as good as having you all doing it :-) It's teaching me a bit of objectivity and analytical skill.

Lachlan

This is what I'm trying to capture:
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=peter+browne+gallery+broken+hill&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=jt5NVc_RNYGi8AW19oCADQ&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAg&biw=1538&bih=1044

(This link is from Firefox on Mac, so if it doesn't work for you, search for 'Peter Browne gallery Broken Hill' in Google, then click 'images'.)

You are suffering from artists curse: "Nothing is good enough". I see limited palette and color harmony and to me that is lovely.

I love the way  you adjusted the foreground; just enough to fill in but still keep the some white space and spontaneity. I tried ArtRage years ago which was a free version and than a really cheap version, but I didn't have in Intuos back then and using a mouse was really  impossible. Once I got one, I started taking lessons at http://digitalartacademy.com/ and have really learned a lot and still keep taking fun course. They are really reasonable. Now I have the Wacom Cintiq where I'm painting right on the painting much like you are with you ipad and really enjoy it.

As far a tracing, there is no law against it. I watched a highly skilled watercolorist paint one time and the first thing she did was grace the floral onto the watercolor paper. I essentially do that using a separate layer for my sketch, especially when there is critical perspective required for animals, peole and things like your VW.