So in the past few posts I’ve been talking about using ArtRage again, and in conjunction with photo editing software. I’m thinking I might work on the sepia-toned flower photo I did as a sample, but I wasn’t sure what media I wanted to use in ArtRage to render the image how I wanted. I wanted something quite delicate with gentle gradations of tone. I was leaning towards using the pen, but I realized I’ve never really played with the art marker, pencil, or crayon settings.
The first trial I did was while I was watching the Ottawa Senators completely smoke the Montreal Canadiens in the first round of Stanley Cup Playoffs (I know, I’m not a huge fan of either, I’m a Canucks fan, but it was kind of funny watching the Sens come back from near death with a 5-1 win over the Habs). I decided for this quick trial I was going to use the marker setting, and do a little image of a flower candle I have. I’d shut my computer down, so I didn’t want to restart it to access the sepia flower photo, I just wanted to have a little play.
Above you can see the photograph of my wee setup I was drawing from, and what I ended up with. By no means is this drawing any good, it was just a trial and I was playing with overlaying colours, blending them, etc. I actually liked using the markers, it was neat how you could overlay different colours and they would blend together as they were “wet” media. I was expecting each colour to harshly overlay the ones underneath, but that’s not what happened. I’m sure you could fiddle with the settings to have it do that, but I liked the tones I was able to create (and still maintain the linework in different areas).
Today I decided to play with some of the other drawing media – the pen, the pencil, and the crayon. I did use the marker a bit again, and imported my sepia flower to use as an underlay to the drawing as well as a reference image. Because I was just doing a trial of the different media, I toned the photo to 40% opacity so it was just hiding under the upper drawing layer. That’s the neat thing about the app, you can underlay an image, use it as a reference image, both, none – whatever you want to do.
In this trial I used all the media on their smallest (finest) size setting, just to see what the detail came out like. In order of detail, the pen was finest, then the pencil, then the art marker, and last was the crayon. The pencil was kind of odd in that it was a little overly “sketchy” looking for what I was trying to accomplish, but it could have been that I just didn’t have the settings done right. The crayon was neat in that you couldn’t blend colours directly, but if you wanted the image to have clear demarcations between colours, then the crayon would be great. It wasn’t good obviously for creating fine details, but in the real world you would never use a crayon for fine details either. In the end I liked the pen the best, it had consistent lines and had nice fine detail so you could sketch and fully colour in an area, or use cross-hatching to achieve a nice texture.
So, once I get around to starting the pen sepia flower drawing, of course I’ll be posting pictures of my progress (or just the finished project if I do it quicker than expected). What media do you like using, do you have one you like to stick to or do you rotate depending on your project?
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