Watercolour Architecture - Using digital software to plan a traditional painting

As an artist, i'm happy to use any tools that help me create my artistic vision. Over the centuries artists have been pretty amazing at creating simple tools to translate the incredibly complex world around them. The viewfinder is a perfect example of this, as is the plumbline: a rectangle with a hole in it and a piece of string with a weight on the end. Awesome.

But, the user still needs to understand the proces of using these simplistic tools. If you don't understand the idea of negative shapes or how to find a good composition, a viewfinder is not going to make you an artist. It'll make you into someone looking at the world through the hole in a rectangle.

Digital tools come under this same class for me, although I appreciate they are more complicated to work at times then the trusty viewfinder. For my most recent paintings of Kedleston Hall I wanted to focus on the architecture and how light plays off the different planes of the building. I didn't want to just draw a fancy house, I wanted to add my own creative flair and vision to what I saw.
So, I kept my colour palette simple. Like, really simple. Three colours in total to create each painting, which would keep things nice and harmonious so I could concentrate on the interesting compositions instead.

In photoshop I adjusted a reference photo to play with tonal contrast and composition, the best way I find to do this is when it's in black and white. Then I go back to the original photo and play around with colour. This helps me visualise lots of different combinations. Doing it digitally like this is a lot faster then trying to do it with traditional mediums, plus I can tweak them cleanly. The last image above has been pixelated so its easier to focus purely on the range of colours and no the compositions details.

Once I have my colours sorted, I can then choose which colours to have in my palette. From there I do a small mock up to help me figure out the best way to apply them and to get me used to mixing the colours. Then, when I come to create the final painting, i've already done all my prep so a lot of the stress has been taken away and I can relax and enjoy the painting process.

Starting to do VJing or how to set-up live digital art events

I want to quickly show you one of my first live art events, how it was set up and how i engaged people in the content. When I do live art events, I want to incorporate participation into the events entertainment and have this effect the structure of my live art. It's so much more interesting for me when i don't know what images i'll be working on at each event! 

 By live art I mean digital/traditional painting that is done infront of the audience instead of a pre-made recording or animation. I know the term VJing is used alot for big events with artists working live but i'm not sure i fall into this catgory yet. I probably do but for now I like the term live art as I think it suits it better.

The event: 
For the  RoCH: Fans and Legends launch event at QUAD a couple of months back, I created a set-up where i created a backdrop and then asked the audience to take photos of themselves in dynamic poses and email these photos to me. I would then incorporate these photos into the scene infront of them, redesigning how they looked to fit the event theme of martial arts.

It was a fun session to do and there was a lot of participation, laughter and opportunity for the audience to come and talk to me as I worked. 

The Set-up
The set up was very low tech, I had my laptop with photoshop, my wacom tablet, a projector and a screen to project onto. And a wifi connection as well, this is an important aspect as if I can't get the photos people are sending me, I don't have a resouce to work with. Kinda awkward...

One of the main things to bare in mind when you're first looking into doing this, is the projectors lumen number. The higher this is, the better quality the image is going to be once projected and it also decides how powerful the projector will be. For the small scale set-up I had I didn't have to be too picky, the projector just had to be good enough to see the details and colours and it was only projecting a short way so power wasn't an issue either. If you want to project outside or onto a building, then you'll need to look into higher powered projectors.

Instructables has a few great tutorials for outside projecting and its definately something i'll be looking to do next year.

You can see from the photos that the event was a success and it helped me to understand how people like to engage with this kind of artwork. It was fascinating for me to see others so interested in the various brushes setting and image editing tools, which for me have become somewhat boring due to using them so often. Seeing how people enjoyed watching the image develop reaffirmed to me that this way of doing live art is something I want to keep exploring.

For more information and images about this event, please visit my website