I'm all pixelated.

In about an hour I'll be taking my friend to the airport, so I whittled away my time (not sleeping) watching the Terminator trilogy and scribbling in Photoshop. I'm becoming more and more comfortable making images in Photoshop, and one of these days I'm going to actually finish a piece with it.

I'm still having a fair amount of trouble when it comes to choosing colors. On this one I cheated a little by creating a bunch of swatches from the original reference. (But, I suppose it isn't really cheating since "no one cares how you got there".) With about a half-dozen colors plucked from the reference I laid in blocks of color and then tweaked the opacity to come up with "new" colors to fill out my range. It's the closest I can come to mixing so far.

Sigh. It's getting there, but I miss painting. Painting started making sense - or at least it became less mysterious. My friend pointed something out to me the other day that hadn't fully occurred to me about working digitally. The arm is missing. Since I usually draw/paint at about 16x20 or larger, I tend to work more with my arm than my wrist. I find it's more comfortable and that's why I don't keep a sketchbook as much these days. But, I can't work that way with digital. There's no holding the tool to work with it's side, and that's taking some getting reacquainted with.

Photoshop has sort of become my working sketchbook in an attempt to get used to it again. Since I started painting I started thinking more in terms of blocks of value and color. Pencils became inadequate for getting at what I was thinking, but now I can knock out full value roughs with the same kind of marks I'd make on canvas. (Kind of like working with a sketch canvas like Leyendecker used to, so he'd know where all of his brushstrokes were on the final painting.) So that's neat. I'm thinking more and more I'll just use it for preparatory work for illustration, but who knows...