A bit about design, and using Illustrator with Painter
It’s been a long time since my last post, but I’ve not had much new to say regarding my use of Painter. Not that I haven’t been using it – I teach it and use it almost every week. I use Painter pretty similarly in most of my pieces so a new one may not have anything different I can show. Also it takes extra effort to prepare images for a demo. As I said in the last entry, what I do here is post information I feel my students and anyone else interested might use.
I’m on winter break from teaching, and I’ve completed several personal pieces since summer, so in this entry I’ll talk about one. Still painting cartoon monsters, I’m afraid. I’d like to discuss the design process a little bit and then point out a technique for using Adobe Illustrator with Painter that I sometimes use when I want graphic precision.
The inspiration for this one came from seeing an amazing cloud pattern while walking my dog one day this last spring. They were perfectly radiating from the center of the horizon in one-point-perspective, long thin wispy cirrus clouds. Having been thinking about drawing these critters, I got the image of a giant happy pet-like creature contentedly sitting astride the world with hair that followed the pattern in the sky.
As always, images like this that spring from the imagination require sketching to get them going. My very first thumbnail was a quick doodle I drew on a Post-It note when I returned. I wanted to get the idea noted before it left me. Later I began the task of bringing the vision I had to life. I wish I was faster at this, but the truth is that I have to do a lot of preliminary work as I’ve shown before. These personal works that have no deadlines take me many hours.
I start by gathering reference, mostly on the Internet these days. I looked for clouds like I saw, and found some that were close but never did see anything quite like them. I also looked at pictures of houses of the classic suburban type. I won’t post any of them here so as not to violate anyone’s copyright, but of course I just use them for loose reference, I’m not copying anything directly in this style of picture. But I do want to point out that even in a very stylized image such as this, research and reference gathering are essential.
Here are just a few of my many variations and refinements. Since my style is very careful and design oriented, I have to make sure all my shapes are pretty well established and defined before I proceed with my final painting.
While digital painting allows easier corrections than ever before, it still can be time consuming and result in an “overworked” look if you make too many changes once you begin painting. Above is a more refined drawing
Here is the final line drawing that I scanned into the computer. This design is symmetrical, since its inspiration was a surprisingly symmetrical sky. As I scribbled along, I arrived at a design that was based on ovals and circles. I usually have what I call a dominant shape character in my personal stylized pictures. It’s a “semi-conscious” decision – I just struggle my way through lots of drawings, and at some point when it feels right I finally see the dominant shapes and then make conscious refinements to get them all working to my satisfaction. Most all the shapes here have a curvilinear feel, even the shingles on the roofs, the grass and bushes, the freckles on the creature. It gives unity to the work. It’s really an “approximate” symmetry, as I carefully balance a few similar size and weight elements that don’t exactly duplicate one another, like shifting the creature’s resting body to the left and differing the houses and trees on each side. You can see I made some final adjustments to these as I went along.
I do want to point out that in my experience often students and beginners at this type of picture making are in too big a hurry to get to the final without doing all the necessary prep work. I always call this “icing a cake you haven’t baked” as I mentioned in an earlier entry. But sometimes I fall victim to this as well. In this case I never really got the hair looking the way I wanted in the drawing phase, but I lied to myself and told myself it was good enough and I was ready to start. After I got into the painting I realized it wasn’t working.
My painting method was as described here before. One thing I did was use Painter’s grid to help me keep things square since this is such a formally balanced design. You can turn it on and off using the toggle switch in the upper right scroll bar. Using the digital airbrush set to grainy edge flat cover I made some straight line strokes to establish the edge of the sky – I had decided to use this “semi-vignette” style of design here rather than the more traditional “four corner” composition – I often do this, I like the added graphic dimension it adds to the pictures, making them their own little self contained worlds and furthering the look of cartoon vs. rendered I’m after.
I painted back to front using many layers (this one ended up with around 200). I usually have a color feel in mind; in this case I wanted it bright, happy and sunny. I knew the monster would be warm to contrast well against the cool blue sky; I had that in my very first “vision” as I was walking the dog. I spent as much time on the small background details as I did the character itself, for me it’s important that all the shapes be integrated - the environment and light are part of the “story”.
As I said, when I began to paint the hair, I saw it wasn’t feeling right. It needed a more formal structure to play off the clouds. At this point I lost many hours trying new variations. Finally I resorted to a method I use when I want very perfect shapes. I drew the hair in Adobe Illustrator. Why use this program instead of Painter’s Shapes tools?
Illustrator is a dedicated vector program and therefore has more methods for creating exact shapes – in this case I drew one stroke of hair and applied a filter to it that created a perfect wave. I then duplicated it and changed its length and arranged it using Illustrator’s grids and guides into a more or less perfect symmetry. If you’re interested in this kind of precise graphic drawing then Illustrator’s a program you might want to learn. But Painter can do many things Illustrator cannot, so I seldom use it alone, preferring to do most of my work in Painter.
Here’s where this technique gets a bit involved. Painter has long allowed you to bring in vector shapes from Illustrator that are still in the shape mode, that is they have strokes and fills and can be controlled in the Shapes menu as opposed to being a regular pixel based layer. As I showed previously, this is how I work, using shapes to become selections for my painting. In order to do this, you have to make sure you save the Illustrator file as an Illustrator 3 version. For some reason Painter has not supported any newer formats in the last 2 or 3 versions, at least not that I can get to consistently work on Macs. I should add that I’m currently beta testing Painter 11 and this still seems to be the case.
Once you have saved the Illustrator file, you can use it in Painter. But here again, you have to do it in a special way to get the result I’m after. If you just go to File>Open, Painter won’t recognize it, it will be grayed out. If you Copy the open Illustrator file and then go to Painter and Paste, it will become a regular pixel layer, which is not what I want. (I’ve read where this technique is supposed to allow you to paste vector shapes, but I can never get it to do so). Instead, you must go to File>Acquire>Adobe Illustrator File in the menu. This will allow you to select the saved file and will open it in its own new Painter document.
You will need to resize the file to the same resolution as your painting (Canvas>Resize), as it will be 72 dpi when it’s acquired. Illustrator is “resolution independent”, so you cannot set a resolution there. The shapes will come in as individual layers in a group. Raising the resolution will not cause “aliasing” or softness in this case because of the vector nature of the shapes. However you must resize the shapes before you do any conversion of them to selections or pixel layers, or bad edges will result. This group can then be dragged and dropped into your painting using the Layer Adjuster.
Once I have the acquired shapes in the right order (they always come in as the top layers when you drag them), I can proceed to paint them as I do selections drawn in Painter with the pen tool. Here I tweaked them a bit, ultimately adding hairs and customizing the ends. This look finally gave me what I was after, having more of the true oval rhythm that runs through the piece. Of course I also made other small adjustments, such as reducing the number of teeth to 3 and adding some birds – I usually make some changes no matter how tight my original drawing is.
Here’s the finished work – I call it Good Hair Day. Hope you have a good one too, and Happy New Year.