Painting petit-à-petit

I've never done much painting.

Between being too daunted to try it - despite being an enthusiastic drawing doodler, and having a cripplingly fierce inner editor/ inner critic, I never really explored the painting side of art. 

Until LittleOne came along - at which point, paint supplies, painting and arty-ing became staples of our playing and learning time. Then I figured I really should take advantage and learn to paint and play.

I tried to play with this piece, and ended up jumping between physical and digital media to reach a final painting pic which I think is pretty cool.

I started off here:

I started off here because LittleOne wanted to be the one to pour out the paints. Which meant we had quite a bit of leftover paint. Which also meant it was my job to use up the rest of the paint when paint-play was deemed over.

I quite liked the effect of the original painted image.

It initially didn't have a sky. But I liked it enough I thought it deserved one. Now I actually didn't have any leftover blue paint, so I ummm, stole some blue from one of LittleOne's generously-splotched paintings (I told myself I was helping it dry faster).

As a side note, I've discovered that I quite like the square brushes. I find the paint effects much more fun to play with.

Once the sky was in, I still liked it. 

So I took the photo of the painting and opened it up in Photoshop Express app (free in the app store). I had fun playing with the colours and effects.

I still liked it.

Then I realised there was no light and shade in the image. This is the point at which not having any kind of painting skills becomes very obvious 😁 

I briefly lamented the lack of an app to add light and shade to a photo, and then remembered *cue flourishing trumpets* my Autodesk Sketchbook app (also free from the app store). 

It allows me to import photos into the app and draw on them. I've not done too much of this, but decided to try it. All on the phone version.

I realised the app has a colour-chooser 'pipette'-type tool which helped me zero in fairly accurately on matching shades of colour. Very cool.

Then I found the approximately-correct-sized digital brushes and sizes and used my inexpert fingers to experimentally paint on the screen. I made the sun rounder, added in some light on the field in front of the sun, and added in some colour at the edges of the image. 

Oooh, it worked!

Then, a final unnecessary glossing and filtering back in the Photoshop Express app, and voila.

I'm still undecided about whether the second last or last image looks best (what do you think?) 

Regardless, a definite contrast between the beginning image and the end one.

And definitely a fun exercise for taking painting baby steps. Score a win for creativity. I think I'll be trying this again soon!

Du fond du coeur x