New Expressive Collage Class on Skillshare

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here…I’ve spent this year learning new skills in order to produce my own classes on Skillshare. Getting up to speed on Premiere Pro while creating my class was pretty intense, but I happily got it done (and now have a useful new creative tool with which to communicate!).

My first Skillshare class is titled Expressive Collage: Bold Brush Strokes, Masks, & Collage with Adobe Photoshop.

Many people are not comfortable expressing inner thoughts & emotions to others. This class will show that you already express yourself every day—the clothes you wear, how you style your hair, your signature...even your astrological sign!—are all forms of personal expression. We will take these existing forms & utilize them through drawing.

We will examine how the hand utilizes six axes of combined motion to create expressive gestural marks. You will apply these concepts with a project in which you choose an idea, emotion, or feeling to express. This class is for aspiring digital artists looking to advance your expressive gestural skills. A basic knowledge of Photoshop will be required.

The primary goal of this course is to take something intangible—a feeling or idea—and translate it visually into something others can experience. This is the basis of expressive art. Having a command of transferring inner thoughts to your outer environment is the key to communication.

This class will be taught using Adobe Photoshop. You may utilize another app if you are not comfortable with Photoshop. However, you may not be able to perform all of the exercises as demonstrated. You are expected to have a basic working knowledge of the application you are using. A pressure-sensitive Wacom or compatible pen tablet is highly recommended.

Join me on Skillshare to take this new class! You can check it out here.

Today is Painter’s 30th birthday!

At 10:00 AM on August 6, 1991 in Boston, Massachusetts, Fractal Design Painter made its public debut at Macworld. The Macworld Exposition was so big—it was the largest annual convention/trade show in Boston—that it required the use of two buildings. If you wanted to savor trade show glitz and glamour, you went to the immense and plush Building 1. 

If, on the other hand, you wanted to see innovative products created by shoestring-budget start-up companies, you went to the dimly lit and claustrophobic Building 2. It may have been in the boondocks, but Building 2 was where the true technological action was to be found. Near the back of Building 2, in a non-descript 10x10 Wacom booth, Fractal Design, at Wacom’s invitation, debuted Painter to the world.

The company I worked for, Time Arts (Santa Rosa, CA), had recently introduced Oasis, a painting application that extensively utilized the Wacom pen’s pressure sensitivity. Time Arts, being another small start-up company, also demoed as guests in the Wacom booth. This situation gave me the opportunity to jealously admire—up close and personal—Mark Zimmer and Tom Hedges’ latest software creation (Mark and Tom had previously written ImageStudio and ColorStudio for Letraset).

Technology moves at such an accelerated pace that it is hard to fully describe the pure exhilaration that accompanied seeing a truly groundbreaking application for the first time. For me, it represented the writing on the wall: Oasis was not to become a software classic. That honor was destined for Painter. 

As the Mac faithful made their way through Macworld that summer, they eventually happened upon the Wacom booth. What was this? Here was a large crowd filling the aisles around the booth and spilling into the surrounding vendor’s paid space, much to their chagrin. Jostling through the entranced throng, one would come eyeballs-to-monitor with Painter. 

There was Mark Zimmer, sketching away on a Wacom tablet—which was new enough that many attendees didn’t have a clue as to what it was or what it was capable of—and creating on the monitor what appeared to be traditional pencil sketches, crayon drawings, and oil paintings.

For the computer graphic aficionado, this was an epiphany. For the general public, it was science fiction.

And within 6 months, I was at Fractal Design working with Mark and Tom.

Emergence User: Artist Lois Bryan

Overgrown Window • © 2021 Lois Bryan

Artist Lois Bryan of Charles Town, West Virginia mixes her photography and digital painting to produce a variety of subject matter.

Recently, Lois has been delving into a more non-figurative approach to her work. The featured painting above, Overgrown Window, hints at architecture via a window frame overgrown with ivy. Below is Lois’ description:

This image was very loosely inspired by one of my own original photos taken in the town of Pavia, Pennsylvania in October of 2008. It was hand-painted, digitally, in Corel Painter with a Wacom tablet, the art pen, and a wide variety of beautiful brushes including the Emergence System from John Derry and brushes from Karen Bonaker.

Lois often pairs her imagery with a descriptive text. Here is what she wrote about this painting:

A broken window in an abandoned building is briefly brightened by trailing colorful autumn leaves.

Along quiet streets in small towns around the world can sometimes be seen buildings that have outlived their original owners and even their purpose. Not much longer for this world, they are often boarded up to to prevent vandalism and quietly await their fate.

But Mother Nature can have other plans. In spring and summer, wildflowers and long silky emerald grasses grace the buildings' foundations and birds nest in the cavities in the old wood. In winter caps of feet-thick snows soften the harsh lines, silvery icicles sometimes as long as your arm sparkle in the sunshine and add mystical beauty. But in autumn ... that's where Mother Nature really outdoes herself. The wild sumac, always the first to turn in Central PA, turns impossible shades of oranges and scarlets and golds, and winds around the old windows in a lover-like embrace while the brilliant greens of the other vines remain vivid.

Like the song says, there truly can be beauty in break down.

Upon a closer viewing, the brushwork becomes an abstract surface roiling with subdued energy.

Detail • Overgrown Window

Emergence brushes excel at creating detail. In the above close-up, Emergence can be seen adding levels of texture that enrich the patina of the painted surface. Lois uses the textural strength of Emergence in her figurative work, as well.

Ready whenever you are • ©2021 lois bryan

In this canine portrait, Lois employed Emergence to add surface detail and expressive strokes to emphasize the dog’s coat.

You can see more of Lois’s work at her website, lois-bryan.artistwebsites.com.

Emergence is available for purchase here.

Creating "The View from Highway 69" with Emergence for Painter 2021

I recently did a painting for a friend. He and his wife recently moved into a new home and asked if I would do a painting for them. He had a photo he taken of a tree he always saw when he was going to and from college in southeastern Kansas. This video details the process I used to create the final digital painting done in Corel Painter 2021 using my Emergence brushes.

In Memoriam

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Emergence 2021 Released and Available for Purchase

I’m pleased to announce that Emergence has been updated for Painter 2021!

Emergence 2021 provides video instructions for installing Emergence into a preferred workspace (the #1 user request). Three new videos are included in the accompanying video instruction that lead you through the manual installation.

I have stopped using the dot release format (1.0.2, 1.0.3, 1.0.4, etc) and am now using the Painter release version (Emergence 2021 in this case) to identify the version of Emergence.

Recent landscape painting using Emergence for textured areas.

A workspace file is included for simplified installation (however, this method of installation prevents easy migration to a preferred workspace). 

Emergence 2021 is $39.95 and can be purchased here.