Rembrandt & Me



Confronted with Rembrandt as a master of painting when starting a digital painting assignment, I thought it appropriate to choose a painting by Rembrandt, where he depicts the resurrected Jesus and two people who realize this astonishing and frightening fact.

http://www.kunstkopie.de/a/rembrandt/der-auferstandene-christu.html

The assignment was to take a painting with interesting lighting and by using a special painting technique making four color compositions. It was meant to start each of the  four compositions anew, still I decided to make one painting and altered the colors via the color options of my photo editing softsare, which is Gimp.

I am a completely new digital painter and needed many hours to accomplish the color compositions and half of the time I needed to understand how my software can help me with this. This meant to learn shortcuts and using the lasso tool to select a rather exact shape, or using the gradient tool by choosing the direction and color, or navigating through the painting, or ...
I thought this may be enough for my first digital painting and I can always improve in the following assignments.

As I understood it I have to choose one of the compositions to proceed painting on it, still, I like all four of them. I may decide for the green one to convey the notion the setting appears in the middle of nature. It is still an intuition and I am excited to learn where it will lead me.

I have started the assignment by making some drawings, which was part of it and which you needed as a guidance through your painting. I also had to put a head of a fancy animal onto the bodies of the painting. This way I drew some little lambs to got a feeling how I can put them into the painting. I also drew the feet of little lambs, because I wanted to change the hands of the people into 'hands' of little lambs.



If you are interested in Chris Oatley's digital painting course, just click here.