Digital Deer and Maple Tree Painting - WIP5

After mostly finishing up the tree bark on my deer painting I decided I wanted to change the dimensions of the canvas. This is another advantage of painting digitally. You can change your mind about things and alter them a lot easier than on a real canvas painting. Here I extended the digital canvas size vertically to create a square, rather than rectangular, painting. You can see where the top line used to be, where the leaves stop. I also extended the bottom of the image a little bit, but not as much as the top because I didn't want the deer to be dead center in the image. Having them off-center a little gives a more pleasing composition.

So the last few days I've been working on extending the tree trunks and branches up to fill that new extra space. I'll obviously need to add more maple leaves too.

OK, so now you're probably wondering, why did I give myself that extra work? Well, as you may know from previous posts, I license my art to manufacturers for use on various products. Creating a square canvas gives me more flexibility, making the artwork suitable for more products. The square image above can now be cropped vertically for use on something like flags, or cropped horizontally for things like placemats, or even cropped into a circle for use on plates. The original horizontal version would not have worked for flags or plates. So by extending it vertically I've just given myself at least 2 more potential licensing options.

Well, now back to painting branches and leaves!