The Stages Of Making A Painting (GIF, Static Image and Plain Text versions)

Well, I was in the mood for another “making of” article, so I thought that I’d show you several of the stages involved in how I make a typical digitally-edited painting. The painting in question is one that will appear here in full-size on the 4th October 2020 and it is called “Gothic 2005”. Here’s a smaller preview of the painting:

This is a reduced-size preview of the painting.

Although I’ve made a (small and slightly amateurish) animated GIF of the stages of making this painting, I’ll also include a static image of all the frames from the animation and a plain text version of this information in case the GIF is too fast and/or the static version is too small to read. I’ll also add a small bonus at the end of the article too. Enjoy:

If this is going too fast to read, scroll down for a static version.

Click for larger image. If the text is too small to read, scroll down for a plain text version of all the text here.

Titles:

“Gothic 2005” – A digitally-edited painting by C. A. Brown
“Making Of”
[Full size painting will be posted here on the 4th October 2020]

Tools:

– Cheap watercolour paper
– Waterproof ink rollerball pen
– Various watercolour pencils
– Waterbrush
– Old scanner from 2006
– Refurbished PC from 2013/14 (?)
– “Jasc Paint Shop Pro 6” (1999)
– “GIMP 2.10” (Open-source)
… And 7-8 years of regular daily art practice (the most important part)

Stages:

– Line art
– Watercolour pencil
– Adding water to the drawing
– Digital brightness/contrast adjustment
– “JASC Paint Shop Pro 6” editing
– “GIMP 2.10” editing

—-Bonus ——

A while after preparing this article, I ended up watching this fascinating mini-documentary about black & white films. So, I was curious about what this painting would look like in greyscale.

And, although the initial results (created by just digitally lowering the colour saturation to zero) weren’t that good, I was able to improve the picture a bit by playing around with the brightness of various parts of the image and also using MS Paint (eg: to add white highlights to the Christmas lights, to add better lighting – and a dithering effect – to the character’s left hand etc..). So, if anyone is curious about what this painting would look like if it was in an old movie, this bonus version of the picture should satisfy your curiosity:

– It’s so much more… artistic 🙂

—————-

Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂