Painting 2

Info & Technical stuff:

• Time: 11 Hours
• Software: Photoshop
• Hardware: Huion Drawing Tablet

What I’ve learned:

• Be mindful of what layer you work on.
• Zoom out and focus less on detail.
• Colour, Shadows and highlights are your best friends.

Inspiration:

• Harut Danielyan – Youtube: https://youtube.com/@harutsart?si=ibjnOKrQEIUB6D0C

Hi there, fellow creatives! Welcome back!

To recap, in my previous painting, I found it difficult not to use outlines, apply excessive detail, and tried to deviate from my graphic design habits. So, it’s safe to assume I will be trying to implement the opposite of that in painting number two. Easy right?

Painting two was an emotional wave of turmoil (mind the pun)! No, seriously, I totally underestimated the difficulty of the theme, which I chose because waves and clouds don’t have outlines (I was on a mission to eliminate, remember?). An hour in, I realized that without outlines, I had to define shapes with color, shadows, and highlights. This was challenging, and I constantly had to backtrack and rework areas.

The sky was particularly difficult. Painting clouds seems easy as it doesn’t have a specific shape that you can get wrong, or so I thought. After a few minutes in, I realized my clouds were looking weird, and I couldn’t figure out why. I ended up reworking them many times, blending more, making them less refined, adding shadows and highlights, and playing with color hues. SO many blues and grays… Eventually, I worked on the sky mostly zoomed out which gave me a better view of the sky as a cohesive unit. At this point, I also added my base color to the sea to get a feeling of the over-all direction I was heading in. My problem was that I could spend hours working on the sky, adding more and more detail, but at some stage I had to make a decision to stop fiddling. It’s very subjective, and if you don’t have a mental idea of what the clouds should look like, you’ll never reach an endpoint.

I implemented the same process when I painted the sea and finally, I found my groove until I realized that I made a big mistake (timestamp: 3:41). I had applied all my base colors and shading on the same layer as the outlines. You can see me realizing this when I frantically turn layers on and off with the hope that I was mistaken, but sadly, this was the case. This was a problem as I could no longer simply turn off or erase my outline layer. I had to push on and cover up the outlines while painting the sea. This took longer than expected. After many cups of coffee, I eventually conquered my outline enemy while keeping the momentum going!

From here on, it was smooth sailing (yep, another pun)… Towards the end, I also flipped and moved the ship (timestamp: 9:34) for a better composition, one of the advantages of working in layers. I then added mist and atmospheric light and a very adventurous and brave flock of birds as a final touch!

My overall aim for this painting was dark and moody, and I tried to incorporate movement and flow. My inspiration for this painting was Harut Danielyan (YouTube: https://youtube.com/@harutsart?si=ibjnOKrQEIUB6D0C). He’s truly a master when it comes to capturing mood and light without diving into too much detail!

That’s a wrap! I really hope you enjoyed the second painting of my journey. See you in painting 3!