Dad in Hot Tub & Eiffel Tower

I forwarded a link to dad of his hot tub picture. (See below if you haven't seen the picture).

When he telephoned, you never heard such squeals of happy laughter. He was thrilled. It was as if I had painted the portrait of a king. He forwarded the link to his sister who was also amazed.

Then the link went to other Beckerman clan members. Same amazed reaction.

I didn't know Dave was painting! This is fantastic. I humbly explained that this wasn't "real painting" but that was lost on one and all. Frankly, early on I would much rather have been a painter - but quickly discovered that I lacked the ability to do anything remotely natural freehand - though these days I doubt that matters anymore. If I attempt to draw still life - it comes out like bad Picasso.

Oh you know Dave - he can do anything he puts his mind to, my cousin said.

My father wants a good sized print, but he also wants lots of small prints that he can hand out along with his business card (I kid you not).

I've been working on a large one of the eiffel tower - much more complex than the other ones since there's a lot of fretwork and willow tree etc. but it has been helpful in steadying my nerves.


This is still early on - but gives you an idea of the approach. The branches of the trees, for example are on there own layer - so I can futz with them on their own. Same for the water. The Eiffel Tower itself is the most difficult - not only because of the fretwork which is amazing - but because I'm having a hard time settling on the color scheme for the structure. I think that after that - everything else will fall into place. So far, the image has about 7 layers, each with a nice mask so I can smooth things over when I'm ready. At first I tried painting the willow tree leaf by leaf. That was impossible, so I found a nice feathery brush, and eventually settled on a series of related greens and yellows to do the job.

I work at 300 dpi, (in this case 11 x 14) so there is a wealth of detail. And p.s. - this stuff could never have been done with my old PC. I'm still doing this all in 16-bit.

Here's the layers from Dad In Hot Tub


One problem of showing this layer stuff is that you don't see how the layers are blended, or what the opacity settings are.