Monday 20 July 2009

Art Monday: sketching with iPod Brushes

Still getting used to it. Brushes is a pretty powerful program for digitally painting on the iPod Touch. I'm hoping to grow in skill with Brushes as I go - perhaps I need a stylus. Right now, I'm using my fingers.

When the idea for my Major Billy Barker & his Pterosaur Squadron hit me,
I was walking in a park and tried to sketch it out. The final colours ended up looking pretty different. But it caught the perspective and clouds.

Here's a slightly more detailed sketch for a new piece I am working on about the accomodationist / science communication uproar that's been happening on science-based blogs for the last little while.
It was again, one of those ideas that I needed to sketch immediately. I filled a couple of pages of my sketchbook, and this image before beginning the final piece. It's a great way to do a quick colour study without the mess. Not sure if the DNA pawn will make the final image though.

The stuff at the Brushes site is pretty inspiring, and illustrator Eric Orchard did some nice work with it recently. I think the key is to spend time with it, as you would any painting medium, rather than solely for sketching as I have done so far. I'm sure I'll be posting new images as they come.

- - - - - - - -
Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

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2 comments:

Sean Craven said...

So you use your fingers as a brush on a touch-sensitive screen?

For the first time, I want one of those.

What file format and resolution do you get? Can you import the sketches directly into a more powerful program on your home computer?

Oh, man. I might want one of those. Like I always say, it ain't the heat, it's the cupidity.

Glendon Mellow said...

Yeah, your fingers act as the brush: you use a menu to choose among three brush types, smooth to rough, and you can alter the diameter of each on a slider.

You can pick colours on a colour wheel, alter by dark and light, and change opacity. By pinching and widening two fingers, you can zoom or shrink.

The files uploaded to my computer as jpegs, and yeah, you can open them however you like, I think. These are completely unaltered files I put up here.

As I mentioned last month I'm mainly using it as a portfolio. And I found you can actually import the images you upload into the Brushes app and mess with them.

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