Birds and Birdhouses Painting Variations

In my previous post you saw my newly completed digital painting consisting of three colorful birdhouses with cardinals, goldfinches, and bluebirds. This scene is fine for prints but since Pixels now offers sizes of throw pillows, mostly square, this horizontal format doesn't work well for them.

One of the great advantages of painting digitally over traditional oils is the ability to move elements around in the painting. This makes it easy for me to rearrange things to better fit the square format of the throw pillows. So here I've created three new variations of the original painting, one with just the bluebirds and the yellow birdhouse, another with just he cardinals and blue birdhouse, and the other with just the goldfinches and red birdhouse. Each design is available individually on throw pillows as well as fine art prints and greeting cards.

Buy this pillow here.

Buy this pillow here.

Buy this pillow here.

Digital Birdhouses Painting Finished

I finally finished my first completely digital bird painting created in Photoshop CS5, a scene of a variety of bird species and some colorful birdhouses in a garden of spring flowers. Here we have eastern bluebirds with a yellow schoolhouse birdhouse, northern red cardinals on a bright blue octagonal birdhouse, and American goldfinches on a red cottage-like birdhouse. I named this piece "Primary Colors" because of the red, yellow, and blue birds and birdhouses. The flowers include white dogwood blossoms and pink, red, and white cosmos flowers.

You can see a larger version of this image on my Pixels.com page, as well as high-res zoom details. You can also get this image on prints and greeting cards there as well.

I'm also happy to announce that, once I submitted this image to the licensing agency, it was very quickly licensed by Bits and Pieces to be used on jigsaw puzzles. Unfortunately, it won't be out until Feb 2016.

In the mean time, I've added a few products to my Zazzle store featuring this image. Because the Bits and Pieces contract is an exclusive one I can't put this on jigsaw puzzles in my Zazzle store. But I have put it on several other products so far including iPad covers, pillows, throw blankets, wallets, mouse pads, and bags, to name a few. I'll be adding more as time permits so check back periodically to see what's new, or contact me and let me know if you'd like to see this on a particular product and I'll do my best to get it up there for you quickly.

Five Indian Pony Variations Now Available

With all the digital editing of paintings I've been doing in Photoshop there are 4 variations of the original Native American War Horse painting now available. The original is the chestnut version with war paint shown first image. The second is the same chestnut pinto horse without war paint. Third is a sepia version of the chestnut horse with war paint. Fourth is a bay pinto version with face war paint color changes. The fifth is a buckskin pinto version, also with the new face paint colors.

The original chestnut pinto horse painting is sold. But all these images are available as fine art prints, greeting cards, and more through pixels.com. Click on an image to go to the product page for that image, or click here to see the entire selection of horse images available.

These images are also available on a wide variety of other products, from coffee mugs to iPad covers to wall clocks, through my Zazzle Store here.

New Cow and Calf Paintings

Since playing around with painting digitally I've been working on creating new paintings from scratch in Photoshop. But I've also revisited some of my older traditional oil paintings to see what I can do with those in PS as well, such as making color variations, or adding/subtracting elements. Here's one I've been playing around with recently, a painting of a Guernsey cow and calf. This is the original oil painting:

But then I wondered how this painting would look if I had made them black and white Holstein cows instead. So I edited the image in Photoshop to make them black and white instead of brown:

Not too bad, huh? But, hey, the background was always a little plain. What if I add a farm to the background now? I actually took an old barn and rolling hills from another painting I did years ago and put it in the background behind the cows. Now we have a rather Americana looking scene:

A little more interesting maybe. Or maybe you prefer the simpler version? Let me know in the comments which version you like best.

All three versions are available as prints on FineArtAmerica.com/Pixels.com.

Digital Bird Painting - WIP5

So, got some more work done on my bird painting expansion. I've moved to the left now and added a bright blue octagonal birdhouse and a pair of red cardinals.

Next I'll be expanding more to the left to add a third birdhouse and a pair of bluebirds.

Small Artworks Collection

I added a new link to my website menu, Small Works. This links to page showcasing all my mini paintings. While not technically all "miniature paintings" it displays a collection of my paintings smaller than 8"x10" in size. That's just sort of what feels comfortable for me, 8"x10" and larger are "regular" sized paintings and smaller than that are minis.

I haven't fully updated the page. I've been trying to add links for each image that goes to pages where you can purchase prints, greeting cards, phone cases, or other products featuring that image, if available. I have quite a few links up but there are still more to do. In the mean time, if you follow the link of one image, you should be able to browse that site to find prints or products featuring most of the other images.

  Visit the Small Works page here.

Digital Bird Painting - WIP4

As I work more on my digital bird painting (Created using Photoshop CS5 and a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet) I'm finding more and more advantages to working digitally. One of the biggest advantages is being able to move things around easily. It's impossible to move anything on real canvas. If I decide I don't like the placement of something on physical canvas my only choice is to paint over the current element and repaint it elsewhere, which can be many hours of work. With proper planning of your digital painting (mainly, keeping all major elements on separate layers in Photoshop) you can easily move things all round with just a few clicks of the mouse. This is helpful in the early stages of roughing out your work to play around with different compositions, of course. But it's a real time saver if you've already spent many hours on an element and decide later you really want to change things around.

Below is a perfect example of saving myself hours of work or, more likely, just leaving things the way they were and not being as satisfied with the end painting. In my previous post you can see the male goldfinch is on the perch of the birdhouse and I was considering having a female poking her head out of the hole. But that seemed too crammed together. So I decided it would look better to have Mommy bird on the perch and Daddy up top keeping a lookout. Because the male was on a separate layer it was easy to just click and drag him up to the roof.

Another thing easily done digitally that's impossible on canvas is expanding. Moving the male goldfinch to the roof meant I needed more room on the "canvas" above the birdhouse. Increasing the size of the background was easy and, because it was on a separate layer from the other elements, it was also easy to fill in the new space with trees, flowers, and sky without having to worry about painting around or messing up the birds and other foreground elements.

Because large images with multiple layers can result in very large files on your hard drive, being able to expand the background only as needed saves on HD space. I'll next be expanding this image to the left to add another birdhouse and more birds, so hopefully you'll see at least a new birdhouse in my next update.