Making Mountains
I set my brushes aside some years ago,
and muttered âThere has got to be a better way to do colorâ.
I like tradition, and I appreciate color theory,
I know it very well from programming generators of color swatches and themes.
And I was ready to grab a pane of glass,
and start a color mixing extravaganza.
But, I stopped myself,
because the traditional way, is not always the better way.
Back then I didn't seriously consider digital paining yet,
I didn't think I could do it.
I expected years of practicing keyboard shortcuts;
I saw digital painting as a formidable challenge.
Once I understood that digital paining is very easy,
in great part due to computers enabling us to start with Hyperrealism.
By allowing us to stretch a transparent reference image over our canvas,
thus giving us perfect color and shape reference.
I became ready,
to look at landscape painting.
Nature is very random, we only need to glance a couple of mountains,
to build our own version of a mountain range.
But colors are still a great challenge,
snowy mountains are usually gray blue as they reflect the sky.
But there is more to it,
huts, trees, mist, the way a distant valley changes color.
The way the color of distant mountains,
changes with sunshine, clouds, or haze.
While it is easy to start painting mountains free hand,
the proper color is a complex web of base color transformations.
The simplest way, though,
is to take a photo of the landscape, and use the colors, via a color picker.
I donât see anything wrong traditional artists,
mixing color based on photo reference.
In digital painting,
the process is reduced to just using the color picker - it is a matter of a click.
The mountain I wanted to paint,
is a symbol of greatness, and of growing all the way up.
And my reference photo showed only a distant mountain range,
and it was a wonderful feeling... to paint the mountain that I wanted to see.
While I didnât quite visualize the mountains in 3D,
I feel I was successful in capturing them on my first try.
I expect, it takes less than ten mountain landscapes,
to paint mountains well, they are much easier than portraits.
I feel wonderful for being able to paint title images for my poems,
and intricate backgrounds for my hyperrealistic portraits.
None of that poses a great challenge,
the on-ramp to digital painting be it portraits of landscapes is very pleasant.
We are all artists,
we were artists, all along.