Digital Art At Last !

April 23, 2008 at 8:56 pm (computer art, Digital Art, Photoshop tips and tricks) (art by Gale Franey, computer art, computer graphics, Digital Art, Gale Franey, galefra, galefraney, graphic design, New Beginnings, Photoshop)

New Beginnings

This is the first digital art piece since I finished school. I now have time again to do digital art !!

I began this one yesterday at about 6 p.m. and just finished it now at 6 p.m. the following day. I worked all evening, all through the night and all day the next day. I have not yet slept. In total it took a marathon 24 hours without a break in between. I’d only stop working for about 10 minutes to make a quick snack, toss something in the microwave. Right now my legs are cramping and I am almost hallucinating from lack of sleep. But I am feeling very happy to finally be able to do art again without piles of homework assignments looming over me.

This file ballooned up to 9 gigs in size in the uncompressed layered format. At full size it is 7200 x 10800 (24 x 36 inches @ 300 dpi. I was so happy that one of my Flickr friends told me abut the PSB large file format, because in the past I was always using PSD, which allows a maximum of 2 gigs to be saved and gives an error message if you try to save anything larger. To compensate, I used to have to flatten several layers to bring the file size down. But now that I know about the PSB large file format, I no longer have to reduce my file sizes, which means that I can later go back to change them or repurpose them. For example I might want to use some forest branches, or in the case of this image, I might want to use the flowers or vines or some other element, which I will then change to something new, unrecognizable from what you see in this scene.

My daughter bought me a wonderful book for a graduation gift, Masterworks of Alphonse Mucha, a Czech painter who lived and worked in Paris durng the late 1800s. I was inspired by the amazing color palette used in his paintings, burnt oranges, olive greens … and I wanted to bring some of these colors into this piece. His style is more of graphic design, but the mood, balance and colors completely inspire me.

Visit my website: The Graphic Groove
Or my gallery on Flickr

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