Atwell gallery painting demo
At the start of the year I was invited to do a digital painting demonstration by the Alfred Cove Art Society, who meet at the Atwell Art Gallery on the last Thursday of every month. I was slotted in for this week passed, and went along to share what I could with a room full of fine artists. When it comes to demonstrations I typically don’t have enough time to do anything really ‘finished’, so focus on showing different techniques. In this case I tried to liken it to painting equivalents. eg. Overlay mode is like glazing, painting in selections is like using masking fluid, and ‘undo’ is like travelling back in time. Something I do on a regular basis here in Perth.
There were an abundance of questions throughout my 1 hour painting, which was great! It’s nice to have an engaged audience, they all seemed really eager and interested.
I received a little traditional vs digital effectiveness and timeliness questioning along the way, which can be hard to field since I haven’t spent nearly as much time with traditional mediums as digital. Anyway, after I’d mostly been focussing on painting the boats one lady challenged me to paint a tree. As you might imagine I had a sly grin when responding “Sure, I’ll draw a tree.” and opened my brush list to select an appropriate tree. Then with a single swoosh a forest appeared and the room cried out “That’s cheating!”
I was amused.
But really it requires more manipulation than just slapping a line of tree clones in, and it was a nice segue into showing them brush creation.
Anyway, I worked the demo image into the painting shown below after painting into a lot of it.
It was mostly referenced from a photo I took at the Amazon River in Peru which I’d always wanted to paint. I loved the mass of boats sitting unattended as we approached the canoe we were boarding. It was almost like a dumping ground, all looking a bit abandoned like raw husks of their former glory. It’s almost haunting. I also added the bird, an escort of sorts. Your guide across the waters, like you need some protection from what lurks beneath. The Amazon is built up as a dangerous place with lots of animals quite capable of eating you and your new safari outfi; yet it looks so placid…
