Voyager

Acrylic painting of my dog, Riley, done in Procreate on the iPad. I think it manages to capture his perpetually worried look. I think I did a good representing fur with the paints – mostly dabbing with a wet brush and a touch of dry brushing in the finishing phase. The fleece of his jacket is less convincing, but it gets the point across.

The name “Voyager” is taken from Voyager’s K9 Apparel who made the jacket and sweater he’s wearing beneath it (you just see just a bit of the blue sweater on the left side there). I really like their stuff and it fits great on a greyhound’s unusual body geometry.

When I started painting in Krita, I saw all the helpers available to modern digital artists. You could trace, sample colors from reference images, automatically smooth your lines, grid your image, project vanishing points, and so on. It’s a big leg up over doing things the old fashioned way. Then again, it’s important to learn all those skills.

When I started off, I was mostly tracing to get my sketch layers down, then painting on top of them. I experimented with sampled colors, but generally found the results disappointing. I was happier eyeballing color. I’ve already spoken at length about the way I would blob color down and then use the blend tool to shape it. My colors may not have been “accurate” but they expressed something about the way I saw the subjects. I’m still really happy with the lighting in the Ear massage piece.

When I switched to the iPad I pretty quickly moved off of tracing. My confidence in my line work was increasing. But I struggled with painting in Procreate a lot at first because of the differences in how the blend tool works. When I started back on it, because I didn’t have the blend tool backing me up, I lost confidence in my color picking, so I was sampling from the references. Procreate makes it so easy to sample colors!

I’ve been doing that more or less ever since. No tracing, but sampled color. My accuracy has improved a lot, but I wasn’t learning much about color theory. In the last few paintings, I tried to break out of that mold, go back to my own color choices, but gave up. This painting, however, has no training wheels at all. This was all me. I’m pretty happy with my progress.

To get these on my phone, I upload them to Google Photos. I’m happy to report Google’s facial recognition algorithm recognized this as Riley and tagged it right away. Accuracy without cheating!