The Land of the Lost

Posted on this page is the result of my first attempt at painting a landscape. I guess it might seem weird to have only one cloud in the sky, but I am rather proud of it as it is only the third one Ive ever painted digitally and not half bad. (albeit a trifle cream - puffy) I feel that working in a digital medium is best for this kind of experimentation because it's so easy to keep track of your steps...or delete them if you aren't pleased with your results. For me. it's more tempting to experiment with color schemes and approaches that I would be more hesistant to try on a nice piece of water color paper. I got a basic tutorial on how to do clouds here:

http://www.optidigit.com/stevens/cloudtut.html

It gives some good simple techniques to do fluffy clouds primarily...a nice way to get started.

The ground in the pic is also the product of something new. In the end it reminds of some flat, barren expanse of dry stoney land. I originally wanted the stones to look more man made and polished..like round, flat cobble stones with simple patterns etched into them. While I was painting though, it seemed to evolve of it's own accord, so I just went with it.

I created the sky as a gradient. Then I did the cloud using many of the ideas form the tutorial above. Then I did the ground..first creating a light peach retangular fill and then drawing the lines over that in light purple with the paintbrush tool. The rest was a combo of paintbrush, airbrush and smudge and burn tools.

Soon I will post my first "water" experiment.






Duststorm