Post Type: Digital Art Digital Painting | | 2D Art | I started this as an exercise to teach me techniques and â??Tricksâ?? in GIMP. I am illustrating childrenâ??s books I wrote and needed to be able to draw. I wanted my book to look different. I could do acrylic but liked the idea of a different look. I had just do or worked on a simple landscape copying a page from a painting book. I got to a point where I figured it out then lost interest in finishing it. I had the idea to do portraits of my girls and knew if it used one of their pictures to learn I would get tired of it and not finish. So I thought what to paint. I had just ripped Orla Fallonâ??s CD to my computer and there was her picture. I scanned it and opened it in GIMP as the first layer. I then created a transparent layer and did a sketch. That is what I worked from. The next layer was her skin color. I just used the color picture tool to get an â??averageâ?? shade and colored in the layer. From there is gets complicated. Eventually I ended up with over 60 layers. Most I just abounded but kept as this was a learning experience.

This might look like I just copied the photo but I did not every stroke I did. Most was done at 800 magnification but I did a lot at 1600.

6 weeks later I suddenly realized I had a painting. At the same time I got a flyer for the county fair art contests and decided to enter it. They just had a new category, â??Faces of the worldâ?? . So I entered it there. It was in the fair but did not win. I should have entered it in the Computer generated category, because they do not take â??Computer Artâ?? seriously, I think they think it is cheating! Computer generated is the wrong name it should be called computer painted. Maybe I will write them a letter about that. They make it should like I just pushed a button and it made it!





Pays one point and 2 member cents.

Orla Fallon Portraite by westendhollow