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.
