How I Changed the Season from Summer to Autumn- a cool digital painting tip!

 

 I have been reading the blog Copyblogger lately, specifically the Copywriting 101 posts.  A quote of the first couple of paragraphs ...

 

"Your headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader. Without a headline or post title that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist.

 Here is the link to the post.
 

With some of the tips from his post in mind I tried to come up with a headline that is more catchy than my usual "Fall Water Fall - a digital watercolour painting in progress." I see his point now, big whoop if somebody or other has a painting in progress! So, looking at the interesting thing about what I am doing here, the thing people might want to know... I came up with "How I Changed the Season from Summer to Autumn- a cool digital painting tip!

 

 

I really liked the way I did the trees in the painting "Rushing Creek." I wasn't crazy about the big rock that dominated the foreground and had toyed with the idea of repainting it for awhile. Never got around to it though, until today when I thought I would try changing the leaves to fall colours using the Correct Colours function in the Effects menu. I also used the Adjust Colours function a little bit to achieve the final colour change.

 

  

 Fall Water Fall Illustration 1

You will open up something that looks like this below. Chose the Curve option from the drop down Colour Correction menu.

 

 

The diagonal line you see is what you will be playing around with to "correct" your colours. This is fun if you haven't tried this before. Play around with changing the curve of each colour by choosing a colour block, then dragging the curve to a different shape. You will see the colour changes in your painting immediately. It takes some experimenting to get the look you want.

 

 

Fall Water Fall Illustration 3 As you can see I dragged the Red curved line upwards and the result can be seen in the painting beside it right away. It adds red to the painting. I adjusted all the colours slightly, as well as the darkness of the painting with the dark grey box, until it ended up the colours I wanted.

This is what it looked like with the colours altered and some Watercolour glazes to warm it up. I did not take a screen capture at exactly that point, but this shows how the leaves were changed from summer greens to fall colours! I added more branches and sketched the waterfall over again changing the huge foreground rock into a couple of rocks instead.

 

 

 

 

I am using a different method to paint the rocks in this than previous paintings. I discovered that a brush called Leaky Marker in the Marker category blends nicely with the Just Add Water blender.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see in this illustration I have worked on depicting the movement of the water. Since the water itself is basically colourless (white) in movement I needed to have something showing through under the water. Some rocks show through a little bit and the water spills over others. (I'll get better at this I hope!)

 

I remember how the water looked green and brownish in small waterfalls. When I was a kid I thought that meant it was polluted! Didn't stop me from playing in it though! I notice in photographs of moving water that the water looks very white and what is under it doesn't show through very much. I am painting what I remember seeing rather than what is actually there. My brothers and sisters will recall all the hikes we took to Duschene Falls (we called it Sheeny Falls lol!) We would pack our lunch of peanut butter and homemade raspberry jam sandwiches and a First Aid Kit. I loved First Aid kits when I was a kid...we made them ourselves following the list in the Girl Guide Handbook! Someone would always manage to get a scrape or two necessitating pulling out the Hydrogen Peroxide and the bandaids. Sometimes I'd give them a Milk of Magnesia tablet for good measure! (I stole them from the medicine cupboard at home!) Little wonder I grew up and went into Nursing! My son had a fascination with First Aid as a Boy Scout too, and is now an Intensive Care Nurse.

This has little to do with painting water falls, but that's the story behind this one!   

 

 

 

 

Fall Water Fall Illustration 8

 

 

Note: I don't know if it is the result of the Headline or not , but I received higher than normal hits on this post yesterday! More likely a result of frequency of blogging. (Not that I'm counting hits or anything! lol!)