Great Painting Exercise

  • SVS Team SVS Instructor Pro SVS OG

    Hey guys, I thought I would throw out an idea for you digital painters who are attempting to learn to paint traditionally.

    Take one of your digital paintings and try to match it as closely as you can in the traditional medium that best suits the style. I am having to do this to a lot of my images becuase I am having a gallery show where they only want original paintings. No digital work allowed. So I'm taking my best selling digital pieces and repainting them.

    This one was orginally pieced together in photoshop (little print on the left) and had all sorts of color layers and tricky adjustment layers. No big deal when painting digitally, but when it came time to mimic those colors and blends traditionally I had my work cut out for me. The background and lantern glow was painted in one pass (using wet in wet technique). It was probably the single most difficult watercolor layer I have ever had to do. It had to be the right value, color AND light glow all at once. I tried it yesterday and failed. So I restarted today and hit it. You can see my little lantern study on the desk to the left. I did about 20 of those.

    Now, with a washy technique such as watercolor I am shooting for about a 90% color and value match. There is no way I'm going to hit it 100% because it's such a loose technique. I'm glazing a bit of brown over the background now to try and get that subtle brown/pink/red of the print background, but it's almost there. I'm going to leave the shadow a bit lighter than the print because I like it better being a tad lighter.

    So, if you have digital paintings sitting around that you like, give this exercise a whirl. You will learn a ton and best of all you are actually copying yourself! So it's a win-win! : )

    Let me know if you have any questions about the process at all.


  • That's pretty accurate.

    For the moment I won't do a photorealism of my own paintings. Copying is boring enough, photocopying my shit would be worse (I already repeat the same things over and over due to my value fails haha), but that's a good exercice to check your skills. You know what you doing with watercolors. I never liked watercolors. You're baws with them :8

    Going to paint with acrylics and oils for a local contest this week, we'll see what I do there haha, my pencils are like beard hair haha

  • SVS Team SVS Instructor Pro SVS OG

    Old man question: What does 'baws" mean?

  • @Lee-White It means "Boss". Just a lazy way of saying it. Boss means "the best." 🙂

  • Great idea Lee!

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