After just over an hour of work tonight, I’m not all that happy with the progress I made. Although, I did salvage a lot from the mistakes I made. It was looking pretty awful for awhile there as I was really messing up the trees. I think I was just adding way too much detail maybe. It wasn’t looking natural and I had to fix it. I shuffled some things around and after adding in that boat there, which I think looks pretty cool, I’m done for the night.

I had a really busy day today and just couldn’t find the time to get home to work on this until about 10:00pm. By that time I was so exhausted and ready for bed. I’m very glad I did a little work on this painting and I really can’t wait to get back to it tomorrow. I may even do those trees over again for the third time!  Each time I’m learning something new and I’m beginning to think that less detail may be the way to go. That being said, while I was painting this tonight I had an interesting thought: I think my stand out quality is my attention to detail. So perhaps I should go all out with the detail because it’s what I do best. I don’t know. Any ideas? I think it’s time to get some sleep. I’ll pick this back up tomorrow.

It feels really good to get pretty much everything painted. I was originally just going to get started on the mountain today, maybe even finish it, but once I got the base color down I wanted to keep going and do that for all of the objects in the painting. After that, I went ahead and created new trees. This time with a better brush. I’m not sure what I was thinking yesterday when I started this painting, as I started it with a blurry brush and up close it looked horrible. So now I have things on the right track.

Seems it wasn’t a fluke that I’ll be pretty decent at painting scenery, because this one is also turning out pretty well. So far it is anyways. I have confidence that I’ll be able to finish it and be pretty satisfied overall. I still have yet to look up any businesses that could help me print out these painting and mail them to me. I know they exist, I’ve read about them before, I just need to do my research. I don’t feel like I’m in a hurry or anything, so I’m taking my time with it. Once I get one printed and (if it’s printed quality is high enough) framed, then I can think about selling them.

I’m working on another painting using Photoshop today, and it’s turning out pretty good so far. I have to make sure I keep mentioning Photoshop as I don’t want anyone to think I actually know what I’m doing when it comes to real paints and canvas. I’ve hardly ever touched the stuff, to be honest. I’ve always been afraid of it and I don’t see that changing anytime real soon. Like I said in yesterday’s post, I may get into real painting someday, but I just don’t see it in my near future.

Digital painting (the one with the undo functionality!) on the other hand, is fantastic. Turns out I may have a knack for it too. Not only am I enjoying myself, most likely because I’m doing something new and exciting, but so far I’m feeling pretty confident about what I can create with the painting tools. I just want to keep making more and more as I’m also learning along the way. But at the same time, everything is looking pretty great. Even the stuff I’m messing around with early on, like today’s picture, I really love. And I’m always my own worst critic!

Even though my expectations are pretty high for myself right now, I also need to take a bit of a step back and maybe go into this new project with the assumption that it won’t turn out quite as great as the last one. That way I don’t think I’ll get frustrated if I can’t get something to look quite right. The best thing to come out of all this digital painting so far however is all that I’m learning along the way. It’s been a very long time since I’ve picked up a new medium and It really has been continuous learning throughout. So no matter how they turn out, it’s been a positive experience.

Today I did some painting! Photoshop painting mind you. The only painting I know anything about, actually. Even so, there was some extremely fun color blending and brush strokes, and I’m so very happy with how this is turning out. Those detailed clouds on the bottom right there, I love them so much.

I’m taking a break for now, and getting this post up and done so I have nothing else to do today (besides a hockey game to watch in a few hours) so I can get back to painting later on and not worry at all about this post. When I have things yet to be completed ahead of me, it’s a bit of a distraction.

The only thing that’s bothering me a little bit with this picture right now, is that the actual painted stuff is looking so good it’s making the black silhouette stand out too much. I may have to look up how to quiet a painted silhouette so it doesn’t jump out too much.

Now this is starting to look like a beach sunset! I absolutely love spending so much time with all the teeny tiny details. There’s just something really satisfying about starting off with a few brush strokes and eventually giving life to my idea. At first I’m worrying that it’s not looking quite right, but I keep pressing on. I guess just seeing it in my mind’s eye as I start small, I just have to believe that it will take shape eventually. I go along thinking like this for about an hour then I zoom out to see the full picture. Boom! Everything looks awesome. That looks like a palm tree and stuff! Especially when you see it full sized.

So I decided to import my drawing from yesterday into Photoshop and finish it up that way. Now that I’m back to using Photoshop once again, I’m able to add so much more detail in a very short time when compared to drawing with pens on paper. Not to mention have many more tools at my disposal. I strongly believe the finished sunset will look above and beyond better than anything I would be able to create with pencils. I want the best looking picture possible, so I might as well try digital with this.

This post is going up very close to midnight because I’ve been working on changing up the look of my website. Right now it’s quite frustrating because I can either have it look great and function well on the desktop version, but the mobile version is terrible. Or vise versa. Bah! I really need to get this fixed as soon as possible. Like I said, it’s frustrating. Any tips and advice would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Since I posted this not 10 minutes ago, I’ve found a nice little plugin that seems to have fixed the problem! Though it’s not perfect, at least the site seems to work well on my tablet. Please write a comment and let me know whether it’s working on your phone or tablet. Thank you!