Sometimes, someone has to face his/her own demons and of course painting is my own way to fight them.
It's something that, in my opinion, goes beyond the simple “like it or not”, so let me try to explain you why I 've painted it and why I've developed it in this particular way.This image represents my need for childhood's happiness in a symbolic way. My life, in the past few years, has been too chaotic, too stressful and full of troubles. I know you can understand me, because everyone has got a negative period in his/her memories. Getting back to the image... I'm the naked woman, in my present time, that wants to catch the tiny white ghost of the girl I was. I was happy, I was pure and simple as a lily. I'm naked because I feel this specific aspect of myself defenceless . The three knights are the enemies of my past. Of course, I'm still alive because I've won all the battles so far, but the war is still open as the arrow piercing my leg shows. I don't know if I'll be able to cope with this loneliness and I don't know if I'll find my way.
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First of all, this time, I had to manage a wide file (50 x 70 cm @300 dpi), cause I developed this image with the specific purpose of being printed and placed on the wall that divides my studio by the rest of the home. So I had no choice with the brushes under Painter : palette knifes (especially for the trees), simple digital airbrushes and charcoals. More complex brushes were too heavy and not so much intuitive.
I had an extensive use of Photoshop as tool for "image manipulation". I'm not so good with composition so I left, till the final stage, all the elements on differents layers, in order to shift, scale, change a little the hue etc etc freely and without delay in the pc- response time.
After the first main step (all the objects in the right place with the right kind of color) I started to develop each subject and unfortunately I did several errors that I can synthesize in :
- poppig up of elements that belongs to the bg, caused by the detail-DNA that I've got. So I spent time painting them and fading them too.
- color errors caused by the lost attention upon the intereaction between objects
- lighting errors for the same reason.
So.. I learnt the "trick": zoom in and zoom out. Never stop to do it, also every 5 minutes. It can be boring but, for me, it run.
As final step I started to add details. You know...if you are a detail-lover is like a cherry on the cake, like saying to yourself "ehi, I've been good, I've done all the bad things I hate so much, now let me enjoy". I created 3 brushes to add movement to the basic colors of the grass, that I found very helpful also for the fur of the horses, then I simply used detail oil, changing its own variables depending on the area I was painting.
I've to add only a thing now : I had terrible experiences of file-corruption under Painter. At one time I was deciding to stop the work at all then I've discovered the "trick". I had to save the riff file as 'uncompressed". This generated files of 1.6 -1.8 GB but I had no more corrupted work. To store the file, I used winrar with the best compression method : from 1.6 GB to 120- 150 MB.
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Here you can find the image-steps(516 KB)
Let me know if you want to see some details or if you are interested to the 3 brushes...everything you want, simply ask
Well, these are my 2 cents. I really hope that this image will be able to strike and make you think about the long way you walked so far and the long way you still have to walk.
Serena
