Blog Archives
iPad painting
Have got behind on my blog postings recently. There are two or three printmaking sessions I need to cover but, just to fill in, I thought I’d post a couple more iPad paintings. As before, these are done with the ArtRage app. I love the way it blends paint as in real painting. I’ve not painted in oils before so don’t know how accurate it is but the colour muddying produces some great effects.
First painting is an abstract from a seascape photograph I found somewhere and downloaded:
I like the blue/pink/yellow effect in the top half of the image and the rust effect on the lower right. The swirls in the bottom middle — taken from where, in the photograph, the sea washes against the pier — are less effective. The marks themselves don’t fit, they unbalance the mark making in the rest of the image. Might try erasing that part of the image and see if it is possible to repaint — like scraping back a real painting. Or, maybe just take the lessons forward and have another go at a similar image. I did do a second, darker, one but it was even worse. What would be useful in ArtRage is a notepad alongside each work where you can record thoughts as you go along.
Today, I wanted to mess around with more muddied colours, so had a go at the good old circle again — one only this time instead of a grid of them.
I really like this one. The brush marks, the textures, the blurring and muddying of the colours. I like the balance of the colours as well. Maybe I should stick to painting abstract circles 
I wonder how this would work as a collagraph. Hmm…
iPad squares
I’ve been playing with ArtRage on the iPad, trying to get used to how the different tools work. There are LOTS of them. I tried doing something similar to the Kandinsky squares that I painted in class with Rod (see previous post). I tried a couple of times while on holiday in Scotland the last two weeks (it was soooo wet, I had lots of free time) but wasn’t happy with the results. This time worked better. It is even less like Kandinsky than my previous acrylic efforts and, believe it or not, took much longer, but I enjoyed the process. I wanted a restricted palette but there seemed no way to do this in the ArtRage toolset, so, in my first square, I loaded a limited set of colours and then used the colour picker to select the colour I wanted at any particular time. At the end, I erased those colours from the square and picked unblended colours from the other squares.
I’m going to have to do a lot more playing with the tools and features of those tools in ArtRage before I can produce decent paintings but it should be fun trying them all out.
Playing on the iPad
For the last week or so, I’ve been working out an idea for a print using five collagraph plates arranged on an A3 size sheet of paper. Each collagraph will be abstract but based on shapes and colours from some of the thousands of photographs we took in New Zealand. Each plate is formed from a mountboard offcut so they’re different sized rectangles mainly (I bought a couple of bags of these offcuts from a framing shop in the Ferrers Centre (Ferrers Frames). I’ve been experimenting on scraps with cutting shapes, filling holes with plaster filler and pushing shapes into them, sealing with spray varnish etc. The whole thing will likely be a complete mess but I hope it’ll let me set a number of lessons into one print. Look out Leicester Print Workshop when I’m done: pity the technician on duty when I come in to try and make this work
Anyway, the reason for this print is that I wanted to try out an idea for one of the vertical strips of mountboard: a sort of waterfall effect. So, I’ve been scribbling on the iPad using ASketch and InspirePro (just discovered that Cmd-Shift-S on OS X takes a screenshot and sticks it into Evernote).
In ASketch, I drew the vertical shape and then sketched in the rock shapes. It is great the way the lines interact, bleeding from one into the other. Gives some great effects (which you’ll get a better idea of from the website than from my scribbles).
(The squiggle on the right was Vick’s contribution.)
Then, in InspirePro, I had a go at adding some colours to the sketch (by saving the ASketch to the photo album then using that as the canvas in InspirePro). Using a dry-ish brush and quite dark colours, I got an idea of what I want to achieve. InspirePro allowed me to upload the pics to Flickr.
It’ll be a long time sketching on the iPad and trying to realise the sketches in prints, before I know what will and won’t work, but I do love the learning process.
iPad drawing
I have started trying out some art apps on the iPad. I’d downloaded a few but without seriously trying them out. But, since starting a local painting course a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d see if any of those apps could help me in my painting. The two I’ve used most in the last week are ArtRage and ASketch.
With ArtRage, I tried importing a photograph as a transparent underlayer and then painting on top of that. This works to a point but you then need to do some serious painting on top of that. I have to say that using ArtRage is just as difficult as using real paint with the advantage being less setting and cleaning up and the wonderful Undo button! It is going to be a while before I can post any of these online!
ASketch is easier to use once you figure out the eccentric way of altering the sketching tool. This is, as the name suggests, an app for sketching only. You get a hard and soft pencil and eraser and that’s it. But it is wonderful to use. I tried copying a couple of b&w photographs from magazines and, while the sketches fall far short of representation, the app itself worked well. I’ll play with that a lot more and, if I get up the courage, may even take it out and do some live drawing!
Those two sketches are up on flickr:
