The Discovery

This is about part two of a digital painting. The first part was about finding a painting with atmospheric lighting, switching human heads with animal heads and exploring the colors for my version of the painting.

I got a comment for the first part,

 

toddconawayAugust 28, 2013 at 8:44 AM

Say, do I see a wicked witch on a broom there? Nice challenging project to learn about Gimp!

 

and according to this comment I've made slight changes to my basic idea. A huddled figure in the foreground and a witch instead of a housewife in the background.

Naturally I was interested what Todd may say now:

@StefanieJ2 Witches, Lambs, and Iguanas, serving biscuits! Perfect combination.
— Todd Conaway (@Todd_Conaway) September 3, 2013

A new challenge and I loved the idea, anyway! Although I was not particularly sure how serious Todd was. I did not mind.

I again tweeted to Todd:

@StefanieJ2 watching these iterations of the piece I am wondering about the "finality" of "art" and the value of the evolution of it.
— Todd Conaway (@Todd_Conaway) September 10, 2013

This time Todd was a bit unpatient, but I was grateful for his statement, which lead me to realize how different people perceive art. I presume Todd finds peace in more traditional paintings, rather than in one that  turns everything topsy-turvy.

                                                                Todd's "Calm in Chaos"

However, I have to find my way and proceeded after Todd's beautiful imagination, and finally I found a close where I thought it is not necessary to do further changes.

The following is the picture with which  all began:



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.