Week 12: First Draft of Digital Painting

Craft

These are my first draft of my digital paintings. I made this by using and creating pictures of bikes and bike parts, using Photoshop, then making my own brushes. There were many steps involved in creating this. The first step was creating my signature stamp. This was done by using the brush tool or pen. Once I wrote my name, I preset it as a brush. Next, I had to take pictures of bikes and bike parts such as the wheel, horn, and bell. Once I had my pictures, I needed to crop them in order to make a new brush. I used the rectangular marquee tool, polygonal lasso tool, and the eraser tool. Once I had six cut outs of bikes and bike parts, I defined them as a brush. Making the last two bikes, I made a bike and a wheel using the rectangular marquee tool, elliptical marquee tool, and the brush tool or pen. I defined them as a brush as well. Once having all the brushes I had to create a new document and combined all the brushes together to create a collage with bikes and their parts. Once I finished, my signature brush was added.

 Composition

I arranged things this way using because I used different values of my two hues and order of layers. Before I could define each bike cut out as a brush, I needed to adjust the brightness and contrast to separate the blacks from the whites since it was created using grayscale. When creating my new document, I made sure it was a 300dpi RGB document. Once I had this document, I created ten layers. On each layer I put one of my bike brushes I recently created. Each layer had one bike brush. I used two hues, blue and green, but used different values of them for each stamp. I also used scale to make some of the brushes on one page smaller while others were bigger. When making each layer, I turned off every layer except the one I was working on. Once I had all ten layers created, I turned on and off layers to see what stood out the most. For the first painting on the left, I arranged things this way because the viewer is able to see not only the bike but also the bell. I am controlling the viewers’ eye by using layer order and different values. The bikes stand out the most because they have a darker hue but the bells also stand out because they are large in scale. The viewers’ eye is drawn to either one of these. For the second painting on the right, I arranged things this way because the viewer can see the wheels, baskets, and also the bikes. I am controlling the viewers’ eye by drawing their attention to the lighter hue baskets which I think stands out the most. The viewer can see the large scaled one but also the small scaled ones. Once my signature was added in a completely different hue, pink or red, the viewers’ eye is also drawn to that because the color greatly stands out.

Concept

These are digital paintings I made using my bike brushes. They don’t really mean anything because they are just a collage of random bikes and bike parts. I am trying to say that by using two hues but different values within them, it can really make one item stand out the most. Turning off the layers also helps when trying to make a painting using only two hues. I am also trying to say that you can make anything into a brush.