I love learning new things about painting

When I find an excellent source of information, it just opens my eyes to a whole new way of thinking and painting. I get so excited. I have found some amazing videos on YouTube by Jeremy Vickery. He has over 25 years experience in the digital art/animation worlds and creates exceptional, concise, informational videos. I’ve applied his teachings to my digital art, and I also start to now use some of that knowledge in my fine art as well.

I did a digital painting of an orchid a little while ago (displayed on the right). To create this painting, I decided I would try my hand at some new digital watercolour brushes from Design Cuts. They work decently for digital, but you know how to paint actual watercolours, they will be a little frustrating until you learn how these digital brushes want to work. I was pretty satisfied with how this painting ended turning out. I used one of my photos from a recent trip to act as my refrerence.

I decided to watch one of Jeremy’s videos this morning and it talks about how to depict contours of your subjects with more depth and realism. The main part of this video talks about how colour temperature (think daylight vs incandescent bulbs) can help show that contour. As objects fall into shadow, the colours become warmer and more saturated. As they go into the light, they get lighter and less saturated. This is most easily seen on a digital colour picker, and he demonstrates this in the video. Amazing. So I decided to try on my most recent drawing of the orchid.

I went back to the reference image, and when I looked again, I could then see that he was absolutely right. So I added more saturated and deeper tones into key parts of the digital painting and now my painting looks way more dimensional.

I added some deeper tones to areas, and also applied this to the background. I duplicated the background and desaturated it, and then erased where the shadows are. Overall it makes the image more interesting and gives it more depth.

I am thrilled to now have this information, that I will start applying it to my fine art paintings to see how that process can work in that medium as well as digitally.

I have uploaded a video that hopefully shows you the difference between the two as separately, the images look quite similar, but once you switch back and forth the changes really show up. The video only lasts about 16 seconds, so repeat as needed.

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