Svetlana and I were walking with our daughter Anna in the Mount Doug Park on a typical Victoria afternoon (light rain interjected with sunshine) when I took a picture of a wall of cedar trees with my iPhone. The bright green leaves were catching the sunlight, and I thought it would be fun to play with layers in the Brushes app on my iPad to try to replicate this effect in a sketch. Transfer of the reference photo to the iPad happens automatically if the Photostream feature of the iCloud is enabled. Later that evening, I made the sketch, by creating separate layers for the inking, the background, the tree trunks, the dark leaves, and the highlights. I tried to complete the entire sketch quickly in order to preserve the spontaneous impression of the scene.
Actually, I find the ability to endlessly adjust a digital painting to be a double-edged sword. One needs to be able to decide when the painting is finished. In fact, the painting needs to be declared finished at a certain point. Otherwise, the perpetual process of refining it would become and infinite source of frustration.
The painting of the sakura was done using a neat app called ArtRage. This app also incorporates layers, similar to the Brushes app, but the distinguishing feature of the ArtRage is its ability to realistically simulate various watercolor and oil painting techniques, from dry strokes to wet-on-wet painting. Realistic rendering of watercolors is particularly challenging in a software, since the algorithm needs to take into account transient drying and wicking effects. The ArtRage simulates various paper textures and also keeps track of the amount of paint applied to a specific area, which allows for some very realistic effects. The downside of this is that the app uses a lot of memory, which sometimes causes it to crash. (Save often!). I was in the middle of a pointillism-inspired painting of the flowers, when the app crashed, and the layer with my beautiful sakura flowers was gone – a symbolic Zen experience, which was appropriate for the subject of the painting, but exceedingly frustrating at the same time. (Save often!!!)
Click on the images to see larger versions or visit my Art gallery.