Digital Work - Bullrider

While I've not been in the printmaking studio (other than to plant up our seedlings for the summer...), I've done a little bit more preparation for some printmaking in the future.

We used to attend the Williams Lake Stampede, but haven't been for a few years. I took lots of photos at the last two with the intention of turning them into something artistic at some point. I had done a few mixed media images from some of the photos: semi-blind contour sketches followed by watercolour monotype and coloured pencil crayons (if I manage to dig up one of those pieces, I'll take a photo and post at some point), but nothing much since. I hadn't decided how else to use the images, then the other day I thought maybe I'd try playing around with GIMP and my Wacom graphics tablet like I did with Murri, and see what came out of it.

So I started with a photo that I'd scanned a while ago, and cropped a little:

I tweaked the image so that it was then just greyscale:

Using a new layer and the Ink tool in GIMP, this is the first sketch:

While I was pretty happy with it, Dave & my cousin, Len, commented that they couldn't figure out where the bull ended and the rider started. I've highlighted the problem area here:

It seemed to them that the chaps of the rider were actually the back of the bull, and thus the leg disappeared and didn't "read" properly: it seemed like the rider was positioned side-saddle. We chatted about what I could do to improve the image, and we decided that as long as there was some kind of distinction between the back of the bull and the chaps of the rider, that it should probably work. Here is the second attempt:

While the leg still disappears to a certain extent, I'm thinking this will probably be it. I do like the composition better, and with a black & white simplification, you definitely can lose detail, but that's something that appeals to me, personally. Any comments or suggestions?

There will likely be more of these as I can take the time to do them; there's already another under way.

Happy Father's Day

Well, we're still waiting for Dave's father's day to be official, but pretty soon it'll be applicable... In the meantime, I did up this silly little digital illustration based on a conversation Dave & I had about carpet pythons - Dave naturally came up with a great play on words (he's very good at that), and this is the result.


As you can see from the long delay in posting, I've not been very creative artistically lately, and that hiatus shall continue for a considerable amount of time, I'm afraid, as I get thrown into the deep end of being a mom. However, I am super keen to get started on the print mosaic project when I'm able to sit and carve again (both physically feel like it and have the time and energy... that will definitely not be any time soon, though!). Hopefully, I'll feel like doing some more sketches in the interim, because I do still have lots of ideas. Anyway, we'll take it as it comes; my creativity will be directed at something a little different for a while, instead :)

Creativity in Craft

Remember my lovely little Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet? I'm still having fun with it (although less time spent on art lately than I'd like, sigh). Anyway, the little tablet has no protection when I travel back & forth with my computer, so I crocheted myself a Bamboo Pocket. See my post here for the details, but this is the end result:


WARNING: Christmas card spoiler - if you don't want to be surprised in your mail next month, read no further!!

Here's my latest creation - I don't have time this year to carve and hand print Christmas cards, so we're going with digital ones, based on a riff off this original digital sketch:

For those of you real digital artists out there, fear not, I realize this is quite amateur, but what the heck, I had fun. I would never call myself a digital artist (check out crackskullbob for an extremely talented selection of mostly digital illustrations); I just goof around with my tablet & GIMP. The real purpose ultimately is to create templates to carve for my relief printmaking, but sometimes it won't get that far. This is one of those times. Sorry for the cop-out this year, folks. Better luck next year.

More Murri

He's just such a fun subject to work with.

So, continuing with the theme of turning digital sketches into block prints:

Lounging
MDF block print, Dremel carved
Daniel Smith water soluble inks on grey Rising Stonehenge paper
© Amie Roman

Sitting
MDF block print, Dremel carved
Daniel Smith water soluble inks on grey Rising Stonehenge paper
© Amie Roman

Birthdays

I have actually been doing a little art, here and there (a little more this week, but we'll get to that in another post); I've just not had a lot of enthusiasm about posting. I spend most of my day on a computer for work, and I have two weekly posts over at Printsy, so by the time my "spare" computer time rolls around, generally I would rather play with GIMP, or catch up with the Reader (yeah, I know, I've not posted anything about that, either, but there have been some good ones, so hopefully I'll be able to pull together something for you on that next week). So, this blog suffers. Bad, Amie, bad.

Well, I had three birthdays (two within days of each other in April, one at the beginning of May) to come up with cards for; fortunately, two of the recipients aren't fussy and were happy with the same card. I took two of the images that I'd played with in GIMP, and turned one

Goofy Murri - digital drawing
© Amie Roman

into a very "quick & dirty" relief print:

Goofy - MDF block print, Dremel carved
Daniel Smith water soluble inks on card stock
© Amie Roman

and the other:

Sitting - digital drawing
© Amie Roman

into a watercolour:

Sun Spot - watercolour
© Amie Roman

All cards were enthusiastically received, and I'm safe for another year (oh, well, until Christmas...)

Theme & Variation

More graphic tablet entertainment! Here's the black & white version:

And a mosaic of colour versions (if you go to my Flickr account, you can see larger versions of each individual colour version, too. Vote for your favourite!):


Again, black & white:


Mosaic of colour:


Woo-hoo!! So much fun!! Gotta go back to work again tomorrow and have family visiting this week, so probably won't be playing again until later in the week or even next week. But I'm really getting such a charge out of this, and, apparently, am inspiring many of you to dust off your graphic tablets and give 'er a go - good on ya!

Addict

I am having way too much fun with this digital art stuff. Here are some more:



And a little colour:

Murri makes such good subject matter! And these are all from mediocre photos, they're good enough to use as a template for digital sketching, though. These are going to make some great relief prints!

Does anyone have any favourites?

Graphics Tablet Coolness

I splurged and invested in a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet at the beginning of this year. I've been using it to play with GIMP, figuring out some of the bazillion things that can be done in that program. And is it ever fun. Allow me to demonstrate.

(BTW, please do not think that this is in any way, shape or form an exhaustive or excellent demonstration of the resources available with either of these tools, I'm just getting started and I've never used any kind of real image manipulation software before).

Start with this:


And then play a little bit with paths, feathering and gradient fills, add one ferry trip between Duke Point and Tsawassen, and Beginning GIMP, to get this:


While I think photo manipulation is fun, and I'm sure I'll do more at some point, I really wanted to be able to use these tools to draft ideas for printmaking, one way or another. I thought I'd try using a few of the tools I'd used in that exercise with this photo:


drew a path around Murri, copied & pasted into a new layer in another file (which I'd started with a black fill as background), then used the Ink tool to draw elements over top of the cut-out of Murri. I would hide the Murri cut-out layer intermittently to check my inking progress. It's quite a challenging tool, because it acts quite a lot like an old-fashioned cartridge or fountain pen in that if you're not careful, you'll blob ink everywhere! But the gorgeous variation in line thickness and shape, I just can't resist. I added a few gentle details using the regular Pen tool, too.


I went back to the first photo:


and did the same thing:

Then I thought I'd do a reverse of the colour scheme, black on white. So from this:


I got this:
Click on it for a larger view. I think it's my favourite so far.

One more:




Kind of similar to my earlier pen & ink Murri sketches on paper:



but much easier (especially as this photo Murri doesn't move around!)