Tag Archives: ocean

The New Dawn

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Finally had a couple days to finish this painting I started last summer. I wanted to paint something for my aunt, who was mourning my grandmother very deeply. This kind of complements the kind of art she already has in her home. I was already tinkering with some similar imagery and theme in another painting I’m planning, so this ended up being a bit of a study for the bigger work (which is mostly sketched).

Maybe I’ll actually paint the other one, too. It’s meant as the companion piece for this other painting from 2023. It’s supposed to be “what it would look like if you loved yourself.” I assume it would look like me completing and selling my creative works on a regular basis.

Anyway, THIS painting is imperfect but I hope it has the intended effect. It’s supposed to be joyful, expressing how every morning is a new beginning, and that we are allowed to feel good about ourselves regardless of what happened yesterday.

If I painted more I’m sure I would be better at it. Also this probably would have come out better if I painted it on canvas instead of a scrap wood. Her left eye is a little wonky because it corresponded with a weird bump in the wood that I didn’t sand down correctly. I didn’t have the right brush for some of the details and I tried to use other random items and my fingers and I just gave up on her fingers. But I think it’s nice. I always learn a lot with every project.

The Living Reef

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It's even better if you can imagine David Attenborough gleefully narrating the death throes of one sea creature as another organism devours it: "The speckled spitfish thrusts its meager stingers in all directions, but it is too late. The tentacled pseudoblob has already begun the digestion process."

It’s even better if you can imagine David Attenborough gleefully narrating the death throes of one sea creature as another organism devours it: “The speckled spitfish thrusts its meager stingers in all directions, but it is too late. The tentacled pseudoblob has already begun the digestion process.”

One of the first digital paintings I ever completed was Eilat, Coral Reef Nature Reserve, August 1999, which has its merits, all things considered, but looking back it’s almost funny. I was working off a photograph for that one, but I had not yet learned how to use layers, or basically any tool other than the brush and the color picker. I didn’t even know how to change brushes at that point, or opacity, or begun experimenting with brush modes. I never did feel 100% satisfied with that picture. I don’t mind things being deliberately rough, but in that case, I simply lacked the knowledge to take it where it needed to go.

That was 11 months ago.

This image does help me see how far I’ve come; it’s not even based on a photo. I didn’t use any reference images at all. The fish are all just bits of color that I played with until they took shape. The entire painting is basically bits of color smeared around. It’s one of my favorite things in Photoshop right now; the blur took can take the roughest image and make it look more real.

(Or, as in yesterday’s comic, it can take a more realistic image and make it look more fake.)

Some of it was probably also inspired by David Attenborough’s The Blue Planet, which is a really lovely thing to watch before bed as long as creatures eating other creatures doesn’t upset you.

The red fish is my absolute favorite. It looks perfect and I would look at it carefully before I drew another fish to see what made it work.

Another thing that’s happened since I got the Wacom tablet is that my brain has begun to dissect light everywhere. Understanding how light works when it falls on objects inspired a big leap for me in taking my work out of the purely flat realm and giving it greater dimensionality. I only tried to use realistic light and darkness in small doses here, but it really changes the character of the image.