An increasing amount of artwork is done digitally – drawing or painting on the computer. For my latest piece, Villets House in Cricklade Street, Swindon, I decided to first do a digital painting. I will explain the reason for this. Many artists initially do a rough sketch or smaller/rougher painting before working on the finished work to get an idea of how the finished work will look and experiment with composition, tones and the palette they will use. Painting digitally has the advantage that you don’t use any consumables and so is cheap. It is much quicker and amendments can be easily made – much easier than working with physical materials. And importantly, no mess! This is the first time I’ve tried this and I can report I found it extremely useful.
I will now describe how went about doing this. First I did the pen outline of the building by hand on paper in the normal way. I then scanned this so I had an outline of the pen on a transparent background in a png file. I then imported this into the the Artrage application on my computer and painted it in a watercolour style. Once I was happy with the final result, I then finished painting the pen outline on paper. Doing the painting digitally helped inform the final physical painting and I’m convinced had I not done the digital painting first, the final physical work would not have turned out as good. Here are the two works side by side.
I much prefer the physical version and enjoyed doing the physical version much more so I won’t be locking away the brushes and paint any time soon but I will be taking this approach for future works.