The Tools to Make Art

In this post I will give you a more detailed description of the tools I use for creating conceptual artwork which, in time, may become a complete studio work rendered in traditional media such as oil, acrylic inks, color pencils and watercolor.

Notan of the Color Image Below

Color Blocking Stage of a Painting

Digital Tool
HP PC with Vista Home Premium (64-bit). Running on a 5MB of memory. I work in front of a 22-inch diagonal display that is always set to 32-bit mode. All my line and color rendering is done with a Wacom Intuos 6 x11-inch tablet. Sometimes I use my HP CanoScan 90 to scan handmade drawings and to create new textures. For storing my digital files I use a 1 TB external hard drive.

Now to the digital painting software. As you know, because of the incompatibilities created by Windows Vista, many of the plugins in Adobe Photoshop, are not ready to run in 64-bit native mode. This has made it necessary for me to install Photoshop CS3 & CS5. I also use Nikon Capture NX2 and Corel Painter 11 for fine tuning the artwork.

Photoshop Workflow
I like to divide my workflow in terms of the creative stages in the painting. First I open Photoshop CS5 (64-bit) where I usually start with masses of dark color (the meta language of notan) and switch to textures brushes to establish mood and anchoring tones. Here I resolve most of the color problems of the painting using the ColoRotate and MagicPicker plugins.

Corel Painter 11 Texturing

New York Central Park

With Painter 11, I usually render the texture and background colors with a specific type of brush, such as Digital Watercolor, and proceed to establish the masses of color that will remain the underlying structure of the painting. In the example shown, you can see the watercolor texture in the background buildings. After this stage I prefer to switch to Photoshop CS5 to work in the critical stages of the painting.

Capture NX2 Fine Tuning
I use Capture NX2 in the final stages of the painting. At this point I am more interested in the global impact of the subject and if the elements "read" correctly. Here I adjust color, contrast levels and sharpness among other things.

Finally, I resize the file using Fractal Printer Pro v5 or Alien Skin Blow Up v2, for display on the web or for printing. If you have a comment or a question email me at carlosherrera700@gmail.com.

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