Digital Art

Recently (June '01), I got myself a new 6x8'' Wacom Intuos tablet. It was one of my best purchases in a long time. After getting over the initial frustration of not being able to look at your hand as you draw, I found that you can do really, really cool stuff with it.

In the woods

Like everyone else I occassionally feel sappy and when that happens such pictures result. If you know about Indian movies, you will know that an essential component to it is the heroine prancing around between the trees of a forest/park etc. This is a classic example of a prancing pose.

As far as the art goes, this is nothing too special. The sketching was not meant to be life-like. The coloring and the general theme of the forest was inspired by the wonderful paintings of bill watterson, the creator of calvin and hobbes. ideally, the scenery would have been painted by a combination of wet-on-dry/wet watercolor techinques, but when i tried experimenting on a blank piece of paper, I found I could screw the whole project in no time flat. Another thing to learn. The coloring was done in photoshop.

Man's Best Friend

A man's best friend? Its not a dog, its the opposable thumb! Let's make a song and dance about it.

Childhood's End

I'm a great fan of Sci-fi and particularly Arthur C Clarke. His novels have some of the grandest visions of the future. He claims to have "invented" the geo-stationary satellites. He repeats this not so subtlely at the introduction to every novel. Anyways, one of the favourite novels is "Childhood's End". Read it if you haven't already. Strictly speaking, the painting doesn't follow from the novel, it was merely inspired in part from it.

Old Woman

By some wierd coincidence, my second attempt was drawing an old woman. (774 x 968 pixels, 611 KB). This is taken from the following photograph. There's still a lot more to learn!For one, I have to cultivate a lot more patience. I got sloppy with the hat towards the end. This drawing requies a little more work, but I got kind of saturated with it.

Old Man

This was my first attempt at painting with the tablet. This was before I discovered the magic "size rule": "Paint at double the resolution of the image you want to create". Therefore there isn't much detail. I couldn't quite figure out what was wrong with it, so I decided to draw from a photograph next. It was after I drew the old woman next that I realized the size rule and also the importance of higlighting in creating visual depth.