First Challenge at Creative Pixels Designs

Ho!Ho!Ho! Christmas is around the corner.... crazy, what? times goes by so quick!!

I'm doing another course at Digital Art Academy - the second part of Art Rage. Wow! You can't believe how enchanted I am with all the possibilities of this program. And also with the sweetness of out teacher, Karen Bonaker.

This is my assignment for the first week and I love doing it!
I used as tracing image an image from the fabulous artist Gustavo Aimar at FLICKR here.

Then I picked the colors using a colorpicker site to generate reference colors.


I also used a textured background from my own under the bird image and made the stroked background and different layers and blending effects. The contour was painted with the black pencil and blended with overlay mode.

See here below my other work, where I was training exclusively with the paint tube and palette knife:




I'm designer at CPD and there is a great challenge going on:

Creative Pixels Designs
store
holds its 1st challenge!
Hurry up to take part in the game and win $ 10!!!

The CPD is launching an unprecedented challenge.
You get the kit made by our creative designers

collaboration kit "Waiting for winter"

This is a fantastic kit with 50 papers and 145 elements and the prize does not stop there, you still receive a gift certificate worth $ 10.00 U.S. dollars for you to get the kit or element you want in our store.
Finished? Noooooooo!!!
There is more, because with the purchase of $ 10, what you do with that gift certificate you will still receive our free with purchased from December.

Run to the CPD, by clicking here and read the rules of the challenge, to agree and sign the rules of the challenge and good luck!

The Exquisite Crane

Hi, dear Readers:
4 weeks already gone in a fly!! My ArtRage course is ending today!!!
The natural elegance and grace of the crane birds are exquisitely and fascinates me.

In this painting I put everything we learned together.
This was a 4-week course at the Digital Art Academy with Karen Bonaker.

I used a traced image,


and painted the bird in Art Rage using tracing colors. When the bird was finished, I saved as png and transported it into Photoshop, where I selected the bird by outline and filled with red to achieve a bird shape. Saved this as a png file( I name it mask-1) and imported to layer in ArtRage. This layer you can always convert into mask at one mouse click in the selection menu options.


For the background I used one of my Photoshop masks which I saved as a png file and converted into a stencil.
Now I could paint the background without worrying to modify the original bird painting because the bird layer was protected with the selection. I used the stencil in the layer below and painted the background using the rule of opposite colors, like Karin told us to do. Layers blending was also used at this point to soften the background.

The Shadow:
I distorted and added a perspective to the mask-1 from the bird in Photoshop


and saved again as png file and imported back to layer in ArtRage. With a lower opacity and a color burn blend mode effect on this shadow layer, my work was finished.

Thank you to all sweet course colleagues for looking and commenting at my work and a big thank you to Karen for opening the door to such an interesting and fabulous painting world!

Keep save and have an nice weekend!

Silke

PS. - I recommend Karen Bonaker's course here at the digitalartacademy.com

Watercolor course!! Wow!!

This is a very short post - but I want to share this with you: Fatima (aka fafbr - my scrap friend) and I are taking watercolor painting lessons with Karen Bonaker at Digital Art Academy with ArtRage software.

Wow, that is so interesting, I never thought that we could get such beautiful results with ArtRage!! I really recommend!

Today we are in our second week (from a total of 4 weeks), and each week we have assignments and live webinars meetings.

My assignment nr 2:
Here is Fatimas assignment nr 1 (isn't this a wonderful painting??!!):

My first assignment was this fish here:

Happy scrapping and paintings (LOL)!!!

Silke