While my husband and I waited for our entrees to come at a Chinese restaurant the other night, I noticed how pretty and graceful the lotus flowers were on our plates. I took out my phone and, so as to not look completely weird, discreetly took a picture while pretending to be typing a text.
A couple of days later I used one of these flowers as the model for my latest design. I decided on red instead of blue and used the simple watercolor brush in the Corel Painter 4. The resulting image is at left. I only hope I was able to do justice to this beautiful Asian symbol.
We inherited our house from my husband's grandmother. It was built in 1903 and it has been in his family since shortly thereafter. It's not anything too grand, but it's solid as a rock and it's all the house we need. In the back yard of our fine old house is a fine old apple tree. It's either a second or third generation grown from a cutting off predecessors that had to be cut down. The apples are mostly green and a little too tart to eat right from the tree, but fantastic for cooking. Granny always called the apples "Maiden's Blush", named for the slight pink tinge they tend to get on the side that gets the most sun. The tree produces so many that we are never able to use even a fraction of them. All summer long our yard smells of fermenting apples and the bees fly around drunk.This was the inspiration for my latest painting. In the Painter program, I started out with the broad watercolor brush but wasn't crazy about how it was going, so I switched to the new simple watercolor brush. It worked much better for what I was trying to achieve. It has a nice grainy quality that gave the apple a more realistic texture. To be honest, I reached a point when I wasn't sure it was identifiable as an apple - more like a yellowish-green blob. That's when I added the little stem. I think it helped. I've added the finished yellowish-green blob with a stem to several Zazzle items. :-)
Still in my creative slump, I decided to just play around with different tools in the Painter program as I often do when I'm out of ideas. This time I chose the variable size hose using the nasturtiums setting. After trying a few things that I was not happy with, I ended up simply making a single row of the flowers. I then applied the pen and ink auto painting to them, followed by the detailed watercolor auto painting. So it isn't entirely of my creation, but close enough to call it my own. It looks particularly nice on the mug and t-shirt.
I've been rather creatively dry for the past few days. When that happens, many times I will just start playing with different brushes in my paint program and eventually something usually transpires. That was the case with this painting of a naive tree. I started with the grainy dry brush. I really like the way it "runs out" of paint at the end of the stroke. (Funny how I don't like when that happens when I'm using real paint.) Anyhoo, that's the brush I used for the outline of the tree and the branches. I then went back to my old standby, the Seurat brush, for the leaves. My love affair with the tablet and painter program continues.
There isn't much I like about summer. I've never been a "fun in the sun" type of gal. Summers in the south are generally so miserably hot that you don't find me outdoors much between July and the end of September. One of the things I do like about summer is daylilies. I love their bright, cheery colors and their graceful dancing in warm breezes. It's almost as if they know their time is fleeting so they have to show their best while they have the time. (Hmm...maybe we could all take an example from that.) Anyway, it was these transient beauties that were the inspiration for my latest digital painting. I painted it using the gouache brush tool. It was my first time using it, but I like the effect. I've added the painting to a number of items in my Zazzle store.
