New Birds and Birdbath Painting

I just finished another new digital painting of some birds and a birdbath in a spring garden. Here we have eastern bluebirds and goldfinches enjoying a stone birdbath fountain water feature. Behind them is a white picket fence covered with a purple clematis vine, and yellow and blue daisies fill the garden below.

Fountain Festivities

34"x28"

Original: Digital

Fine Art Prints and Greeting Cards available here.

I want to clarify something about my digital art. A lot of people seem to scoff at the idea of a digital painting being fine art. I can understand why since, if you were to do a Google search for "oil painting in Photoshop" for example, you will find tutorials on how to make a photograph look like an oil painting. Unfortunately, a lot of people will do this sort of photo manipulation and try to pass it off as a real painting, or at least least hand-painted in Photoshop or the like. Taking a photograph and using the mixer brush on it in PS to give it a painted look is not hand-painted art, in my opinion. So I can understand why people are skeptical when someone claims their image is a digital "painting".

I want to point out that my paintings are all hand-painted from scratch. I paint each and every brush stroke of my digital painting by hand just as I would a real oil. There is no photo manipulation in this painting. There are no photographic elements at all in it, in fact. The only "cheating" I do in digital painting is reusing some of the elements from other paintings I did. For example, I did use parts of the birds from my previous birds and birdhouses painting. It isn't as simple as copying and pasting in most cases, though. I did things like turn heads, and adjust feet and shadows, so it still required some work. But this was only after creating the first image one brush stroke at a time. A digital painting can be just as much work, and take just as long to create, as an original oil painting. So I hope you can appreciate the time and effort that can go into such a piece next time you see a digital painting.