Michelle Wrighton Fine Art and Photography

I am slowly resigning myself to the idea that the ‘challenges’ of country wireless internet means I can’t necessarily update my blog whenever its suitable to me and that blog posts are probably better late than never. So in that spirit, this is an older digital painting of Annabelle, a black Standard Poodle, with a step by step progress demonstration image to show how the painting was created.

Black Standard Poodle Pet Portrait Painting

Although painted digitally using my Intuos 4 drawing tablet and ‘digital’ paintbrush, I develop the painting digitally just like I do when painting or drawing with traditional art mediums. I sketch the subject, and then start adding colour by blocking in the main shapes and values (shadows and highlights), and ‘glaze’ with varying degrees of transparent colour to create depth and form. Finally the details are added to complete the painting.

Painting in Progress images Black Standard Poodle

If you would like to commission a portrait of your poodle or other pet in traditional oil paints, graphite/charcoal or a digital painting such as this one, please contact me to discuss your requirements.

A few people have asked recently how I create my digital paintings so I thought I would write a post with some work in progress images to show how I paint.

There are a number of ways to create art in a digital format, there really is no right or wrong way, it is all up to the individual artist.  My background is a lifetime spent working with traditional art materials – graphite, charcoal, colour pencils, pastels, acrylics and oils – and I utilize all this experience and knowledge I have gained working with traditional art mediums to paint digitally.  I use a Wacom Intuos 4 digital graphics tablet and electronic art pen and the powerful real media emulation program Corel Painter XI to literally paint just like I do with traditional mediums, just electronically.  The Painter program allows me to choose the type of medium (charcoal, pastels, watercolours, oils etc), the size and type of brush and blenders I wish to use, as well as the support I want to paint on such as canvas, sanded pastel papers, watercolour papers etc.

All of these variables respond just as they do with real life mediums in regards to the application, mixing and blending of colour.  The pressure sensitive tablet and pen records not only the movement of the pen (digital paintbrush) as I move my hand, but also the angle I hold the pen at, as well as the pressure that I apply to make each mark – essentially all of the variables that make a particular mark with traditional art materials are duplicated by the amazing technology that I have available to use.

The biggest difference for me between painting digitally and painting traditionally are all positive – the lack of mess, no wasted time setting up, lack of fumes & toxic ingredients (an important factor when you have auto-immune issues), no paintbrushes to clean, no wasted paint, no running out of the perfect colour mix, being able to paint for five minutes at a time if that is all I have available or if I unexpectedly get interrupted.  Probably more important to me personally as an artist though, is that painting digitally has allowed my creativity to flourish in a way that has never happened with traditional art mediums – I put this down to working photo realistically which is very time consuming and mentally draining.

With digital painting I am free to follow the slightest hint of inspiration for trying something new, knowing that I can always go back to the last saved copy if that particular path of inspiration comes to a dead end.  This is certainly not something I ever tried with traditional mediums for fear of completely destroying dozens of hours of work on a painting.  LOL so I should probably add ‘liberating’ to the list of reasons that I love digital painting so much!

There is so much more that I could write about digital painting, but I will leave that for another post!

This is a painting I finished recently of a lovely grey arab photographed by fellow artist, Cathy Sheeter.  I havn’t given this one a title yet, so if you have any good ideas, I would love to hear them!

Finished digital painting of a grey arab horse, © 2010 Michelle Wrighton

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