Award Winners

I am happy to announce that my both of my entries in the 8th annual Figurative Art Competition at the Light, Space and Time Gallery earned awards!!

The gallery received 626 entries from 27 different countries around the world as well as from 32 different states in the U.S.  Artists were asked for their interpretation of the “Figurative” theme by submitting their best abstract or representational art for this competition.  I've been doing quite a lot of digital renders featuring dancers recently, so it was natural for me to enter these two images.

The exhibition has been divided into three media categories.  Painting & Other Media, Photography & Digital and 3D Art.  In addition, there is an overall Winning Artists Category, which is the “best of the best” and consists of the ten (10) best entries comprised from the media categories.

The gallery included Special Merit awards and Special Recognition awards for outstanding art. Many of the artists in either of these groups could have easily been included in the upper tier of our winners, as their art was also exceptional.

So it's a very special honor for me to have been awarded a Special Merit award for my digital artwork, "Dance Like No One is Watching."

In addition, my entry titled "Pas De Deux" earned a Special Recognition in the Photography/Digital Art category.

To say I am thrilled to have won these awards would be an understatement!

You can see all the winning entries in all categories at this link.

Lovely Ladies Series

Being a digital artist, I have found that the quality of my work is not only influenced by my level of technical expertise with the software I am using, but also with the quality of the digital models available.

When DAZ started out, their basic male and female models were Michael and Victoria.  When I got started in 3D art, Michael 3 and Victoria 3 were the models of choice.

I get a chuckle out of looking at my really early work because the models were still pretty basic and my own proficiency levels with the software were lacking. 

DAZ just released Michael 7 and Victoria 7, but actually I prefer the previous iteration -- Michael 6, and a female model named Olympia 6.

Below are a few portraits I have done recently, using Olympia 6 as my model, which I have come to think of as my "Lovely Ladies" series.

Vintage Photo Studio

Available on canvas and prints here.
(this piece recently earned an Award of Special Merit at the Light, Space & Time Open Art Competition. The competition received 734 entries! Woo hoo!!!)

Pretty in Pink

Available on canvas and prints here.

 I wanted to do something different with this one. I tried several different Photoshop actions on the final render, but the one I liked most of all was this black and white version.

 Summer Breeze
Available on canvas and prints here.

I'm still working on this last one.  It's the first render I have done using DAZ's new NVIDEA "iRay" render engine.  (I would explain that, but I'm not actually sure about it myself!)

Untitled

Iray rendering takes lighting to a whole new level and allow use of physically based environments so that with the correct tools and setups we can replicate real world lighting. (that's the theory, anyway!)

Yesterday I purchased a new add-on for DAZ, the Ultra Genesis Studio 1 light set from Traveler and Syyd at Runtime DNA.com and thankfully, the creators provided a handy .pdf file of instructions on how to use the lights, the cameras and the environments.

I'm looking forward to playing with it some more and getting more proficient with it.

It's like having my own personal modeling agency and photography studio!

Watch this space for more!

On the Mission Trail - Digital Paintings

 My husband and I love to visit San Antonio, just a couple of hours to the west of us. Usually we go during the Holiday season to see the River Walk all lit up with Christmas lights.  But a couple of years ago we decided to visit the San Antonio missions. I really enjoyed the trip, enjoyed learning the history of the missions and took literally hundreds of photos.

While I had some lovely photos when we got back, I never really did anything with them.  They just sat on my back up drive, waiting.

Recently I discovered a program called Impression by Topaz.  It's a very powerful art program that lets you create beautiful paintings, sketches and watercolors from your photographs. I thought it would be the perfect way to create some meaningful art out of my original photos.

The first paintings I worked on were Mission Concepcion and Mission Arches.

 This is available as a print here:  Mission Concepcion

From the Topaz Labs website:
"Impression helps make your photos more expressive by authentically turning them into art, the way a real painter would. Rigidly realistic photos sometimes leave less room for emotion, personal feeling, and story. Instead of just showing reality, take your viewers on a story by using Impression to capture emotion and feeling rather than details. This can make your work both more powerful and more personal."

This is available as a print here: Mission Arches

What's a visit to San Antonio without a walk along the River Walk?  I've always dreamed of being able to do a painting or drawing of the lovely stone bridges that cross the river, but I do worry that with the crowds of people that jostle along the paths on either side, I would end up in the water with the ducks! So I compromised and used Impression to create a colored pencil drawing, which you can see below, from one of the photographs I took on that trip.

This is available as a print here: San Antonio River Walk

Impression comes with a lot of presets, which are all wonderful in their own right.  And in addition you can make endless changes in texture, lighting, brush size and stroke to make each piece you create a genuine work of art.

These are only small versions of the paintings I made from my photographs, but if you click on them you can see a larger version and get an idea of the painterly detail I was able to create.

If you'd like to try Impression by Topaz, they offer a 30-day free trial. Just scroll down to the bottom of their webpage.   Enjoy!

The Making of "Rainy Day at the Lake"

It's a cold, wet, dreary day in Texas.  The sort of day to curl up on the sofa and read a book, or do some artwork, or watch a movie!

It got me thinking about a 3D digital artwork I created some time ago called "Rainy Day at the Lake."

I wanted a typical English scene - a cloudy, rainy day, with a family of ducks paddling across a pond in the driving rain.

Here's the image.  It's been popular on mousepads and cards in my Zazzle store, and it's also available on canvas and as prints at www.jaynewilsonart.com

I thought I would get my blog started up again this year by showing how the image was made, the steps it took to create it.

I created it in Vue, by e-On Software, a 3D digital art program.

As you work in Vue, the workspace is divided into four panes, each giving a different view of your scene. 

The top right hand pane is the view from the top - useful for placing one element behind another. From above, you can see dotted lines, which show the visual scope of the "camera" (the point from which the image is rendered). 

The area within those lines will be in your render, so you need to make sure everything is well placed.  Outside those lines, it doesn't matter and you can keep the file size down by not populating those area with lots of detail such as trees, grass etc.

 

Top View

 

Additional windows show you views from the front and from the side.  All these view aid in placing objects within the 3D environment that Vue creates inside your computer.  The bottom right hand pane shows you the camera view, this is how your final render will look.

 

Vue Workspace

The main detail of this scene would be the lake.  My vision was to have a grassy foreground, the lake in the middle ground and the far bank, with some trees and a house in the background and a stone bridge on the right, providing access to the house.  To create the lake I added a standard terrain and began "excavating." 

 

Terrain Editor

I'm still learning how to manipulate terrains but I knew this one didn't have to be too detailed, because of the viewpoint of the camera.  All that would be seen would be the far bank.  Everything else would be out of the view of the camera.

Then I added a water plane and applied a material, one of a purchased set with the effect of rain drops on the water surface.

The next thing to do was to add the atmosphere for which I used Vue's versatile Atmosphere editor and selected one of the stock atmospheres.  As usual I made some minor tweaks to get the general look I wanted. 

Then I  went about adding that rain. This was done by creating a cylinder object, to which I added a transparent mat that I created in Photoshop Elements with my raindrops "painted" on it.  This was centered over the camera, so the camera was actually looking through it to the rest of the scene.  I rotated it on the x axis to give the rain a bit of a slant.

Once I had the terrains and atmosphere done,  I added the other elements, such as the house and the bridge. These were purchased models which I then resized and positioned along the x, y and z axis using the "gizmos" in Vue until they were where I wanted them, and in proportionate size.

The next step is adding the vegetation -- trees, plants, grasses.  This can either be done by applying an Ecostyem to an entire terrain, or by painting the ecosystem only where it is needed.

As my system gets bogged down by huge ecosystems that populate the entire scene, I usually use the latter option and just paint them where needed. This can be done individually or with an airbrush type of effect.

 

Ecosystem

You can see the red dots indicating the locations of the trees and grasses in this screen shot. As you can see in the top left pane, I only placed them within the dotted lines indicated the field of vision of the camera -- much easier for my computer to handle!

At this point it becomes a case of making test or preview renders, then making adjustments as necessary until I'm happy with the scene.  I usually do lots of test renders and then, when I think it's complete, I usually do one more because I always seem to find a glaring error staring me right in the face!  

But eventually I get to the point where I am happy with the finished image and can do a final render.

I hope you have enjoyed this glimpse at the world of the 3D artist.

 

The Great American Road Trip

I'm originally from England and although I have lived in the U.S. for over 30 years, up until last year I had actually seen very little of it.

That was when my husband decided to plan a cross country road trip for us. It really was the trip of a lifetime and we came home with a treasure chest of memories and hundreds of photographs.

Our first stop was Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. The caverns were spectacular, to say the least!

It was a first test for my new camera, and although not all of the photos were successful, there were a few gems among them. I thought this particular formation, The Chinese Theater, was especially photogenic.

We couldn't go on a Great American Road Trip without visiting the Grand Canyon could we?

Unfortunately it was a bit hazy while we were there and for most of the day we didn't see the canyon in all it's glory.  However, my husband booked us on the "Sunset Tour" and while the driver was concerned that we might not be lucky, in actual fact, once the sun got down to the horizon, it broke out underneath the cloud layer and we were treated to some spectacular views.

I was worried that our drive across Nevada might be a bit dull - miles upon miles of desert terrain.  However, it was far from it.  For a start, the "Great Basin" as it is called, is surrounded on all sides by mountains, which we don't have down here in my area of Texas.  And then we kept seeing these dust devils around us.  I was fascinated by them, and became determined to get a photo.

Let me tell you, it's not easy to get a photo of a dust devil through the bug-spattered windshield of a car at 55 mph, but after numerous failures, I finally got a good photo.

Later in our trip, we visited Bryce Canyon in Utah. Interestingly, the 3D graphics programs my husband introduced me to when we met is called Bryce and was actually named after Bryce Canyon.

Below is the promo image from Bryce 5.5, actually created in the program itself, and below it is a photograph I took from Ponderosa Point at Bryce Canyon.

Can you see where the  inspiration for the promo image came from?  

Our trip eventually took us across the Sierras to the West Coast.  On the way, we stopped at beautiful Lake Tahoe.  This is one place I have been before and can never get tired of it.  I haven't even been there in winter yet!

This is one of many photos I took as we went on a drive around the lake.  I call it "Lake Tahoe Through the Trees.

 I'm rather proud of this photograph as it recently earned a Special Recognition in the 4th Annual "Landscapes" Art Competition held by the Light, Space and Time Online Art Gallery.  This was quite an accomplishment as there were 587 entries from around the world!

Everywhere we went, in addition to being committed to taking the best photographs we could, Eric and I found ourselves getting ideas and inspiration for digital landscapes to create in Vue, the 3D graphics software we now use.

Below is an image rendered in Vue of Emerald Bay at Lake Tahoe.  I didn't create this - it was a sample scene that came with Vue when I purchased it, to show the power of the program.  All I did was click on the render button, so I can't take any credit.

Below is a older Vue render inspired by my first trip to Lake Tahoe, several years ago.  I created this from scratch and of course I can find faults with it now. But on the whole, I'm rather pleased with how it came out.

Some of my best photographs from The Great American Road Trip are available as prints and art cards on my website at www.jaynewilsonart.com and I will probably add some more in the coming weeks.

The Story Behind "Here Without You"

My husband and I will celebrate our seventh anniversary later this year, but we've actually known each other quite a bit longer than that.

We met in an online chat room, back when they were all the rage, and maintained a long distance relationship for four years, before our wedding in 2007.

During that time Eric introduced me to the digital art programs Bryce and DAZ and, encouraged by his sister, also a prolific digital artist, I got hooked!

"Here Without You" is one of my earlier digital artworks, created in DAZ 3D.  I created it on a long night sitting at home alone listening to our special music on iTunes.

Not surprisingly, given the title I finally gave it, I was listening to "Here Without You" by Three Doors Down when I came up with the idea for this piece.

I wanted to convey the longing I myself was feeling, waiting for Eric's next visit or the day we could finally be together forever.

If you look closely, you'll see that she has an actual photograph of my then fiance balanced on her lap -- thanks to the wonders of 3D graphics programs I was able to apply the photo to a small rectangular plane and then position it on her lap like a much loved portrait.

Even now when I look at this piece, it really takes me back to those days and everything it took for us to meet, get together and finally be able to marry.

Not all online relationships work out, but I'm very happy that ours worked out so well.

Spring in Texas means it's Bluebonnet time!

It's a chilly, drizzly, bleak day today.  Not the sort of day we expect here in Texas in springtime.

I'm not complaining though, because my garden loving the soft gentle rain we're getting.  After two years of drought conditions, I won't complain about rain ever again!

The cold winter we had this year, along with the lifegiving rains we are getting now, seem to have had a positive effect on the wildflowers for which Texas is famed.  Even just driving along the freeway on my homeward commute, I smiled as I saw the medians swathed in bluebonnets, Indian paintbrushes and other beauties.

The past couple of years were not easy on wildflowers and the patches of color were smaller, sparser and further apart than in previous years.  This year is looking to be a good year for the native flora of Texas.

I had long wanted to create a scene with bluebonnets in Vue, but was limited by the plant models available.  Then I came across a way to make my own bluebonnets for use in Vue, by taking a photo of a single bluebonnet, making a mask with it and applying it to an "alpha plane". 

Without going in to too much detail, this essentially creates a little "billboard" that you can place in your scene as part of the ecosystem, which contains all the grasses and plants in the scene..

If you click on the image below, you can see a larger view and you can see how many bluebonnets there are -- see all those blue dots? Each dot represents a single bluebonnet on an alpha plane, oriented toward the "camera" (the point at which the scene is viewed from) for best effect.

OK - so it's not a 3D model of a bluebonnet, but I think the effect is pretty good in the finished picture.  You can click on the image below for a larger version.

"Lazy River" Wins Special Merit Award

When my husband and I first delved in to Vue, by E-On Software, we downloaded the freebie "Personal Learning Edition" which offered all the features of the full version, but with some restrictions.

First of all, it limited the size of your render. and second it put a large logo in the corner of the image.

But it allowed us to see the possibilities of the software and to start playing around with it enough to discuss purchasing the full version.

When, after a certain amount of time, every single render with the "PLE" had multiple watermarks checkered across the image, we finally decided to go ahead and make our purchases. That was sometime in 2011.

Vue comes in several editions, from the Extreme (all bells and whistles and then some - the sort of program used to work on CGI movies like Avatar) down to a stripped down version that I forget the name of.

We went for the Esprit version, which is somewhere in the middle price range, and we added on a couple of modules for increased functionality -- the Ecosystem and Ecopainter modules, (in my mind, probably THE most impressive feature of Vue which allows you to populate your scenes with vegetation - grasses, plants, trees etc.) and also the Botanica module, which allows you to edit plants and trees.

The very first scene I worked on once I had my new software installed was a scene with a quiet stream with reeds and trees along the banks.  I played around with several different atmospheres until I found just the right serene misty look I was after.

And just for good measure I added a family of ducks that were created and posed in DAZ 3D and then imported as a Wavefront Object into Vue.

I named the piece "Lazy River" and it has remained one of my favorite artworks.

A month or so ago, I decided to enter it, among some other pieces, into an International Juried Art Competition organized by the Light, Space Time, Jupiter, Florida.

I just found out today that it earned a Special Merit Award! Apparently, the gallery received 673 entries from 24 different countries and from 36 different states and the District of Columbia, so to earn a Special Merit award is a huge honor!


Excuse me while I pat myself on the back :-)

The Making of Country Lane in Fall

Fall is my favorite season. I love fall colors, even though we really don't get much in the way of fall color here in Texas.  It seems to me that the leaves stay green until they just drop off the trees here.

That could be why I enjoy creating artwork which features fall colors.

A couple of weeks ago I started working on a new artwork which I entitled "Country Lane in Fall".

What follows is a little detail about how I created it in Vue.  I'll show you the actual image at the end of the post :-)  As always, you can click on the images to see a larger version.

 ***

I had an idea of what I wanted, but creating it in Vue was a bit of a challenge as my technical skills are still lacking in some areas.  I'm just not very good at sculpting terrains yet.  Usually, I load a standard heightfield terrain and squish it almost flat.

That creates a nice enough base for many scenes.  I often use something like that for the foreground and then add hills in the background.

But for the scene I had in mind, I wanted a country lane, complete with cart tracks, or tractor tracks in the dirt.

Some time ago I watched a video tutorial which showed something similar to what I wanted, and it used a "heightmap", basically a greyscale image that Vue would blend with it's own fractal terrain to modify it.

So first, here is the standard heightfield terrain in Vue.  There are all sorts of tools for tweaking it and creating impressive terrains but I'm still learning how to use them.

Next, in Photoshop Elements, I created a new file and "painted" a country lane.  I used a fuzzy edged brush in grey to create the lane and then a darker color to create the deeper tracks.  (lighter colors create higher terrains, darker colors are lower)

Within the "Terrain Editor" in Vue, you import your jpeg file and specify the proportions you want to use - i.e. do you want more of the default terrain or do you want more of your jpeg image?

I selected roughly 50/50 between the two.  It gives you a rough (and I do mean rough) preview of what it will look like before you hit ok.

It was still way too deep for my taste - I wanted cart tracks, not WW I trenches, so I flattened the whole terrain down considerably until it looked something like this:

Next came the fun part of adding in the texture, the trees, grasses, weeds etc. placing the fence and getting the atmosphere the way I wanted it.

This took me literally days.  I would think I had it done and would render it, which involved leaving it to run on its own for three hours. Then I would come back and look at the render and decide I didn't like something, or discover some glaring error which couldn't be fixed in post work.

At least twice I just left the computer rendering while I went to bed, so I wasn't able to get back to the piece until I got home from work the next day.  (Work really does get in the way sometimes)

But finally, I had something I was happy with:- "Country Lane in Fall"

While I really like the original version above, this evening, I played around with it in Photoshop Elements, applying filters. (I don't have Filter Forge, like many digital artists, although if they have a version that will work with Elements on a Mac, I may shell out the bucks for it).  Instead I used the Paint Daubs filter and really love the Impressionist feel it gives the image.

I'm not sure if the Paint Daub effect is even visible at this size, but on a full size 26 " x 15" original, it looks great.  Or at least I think it does, I'd love to hear what others think, if you can even see it at this resolution and size.

I'm now in a quandry as to which version to use as my final image that I post on Fine Art America and that I use to create products for my Zazzle store.  I *think* I'm leaning toward the Impressionist version.  What do you think?

A Peek Inside the Studio and the Making of "The High Country" (or "Do Keep Up, Tonto!")

It was my birthday last week. We won't go in to details, like how old I am, but I wanted to give a shout out to my wonderful husband, Eric, who willingly parted with a hefty chunk of change to replace my three year old iMac with a new 27 inch iMac.

So I thought I'd give you a peek inside "Mockingbird Studio" and give you an idea of where I work on my art projects.

The fact that the new monitor is much bigger than the one I had before (a mere 21 inch) caused me to have to rearrange my studio.  I used to have my computer on a small desk to the left of this photo, facing over a half wall into the living room and the garden beyond.

The configuration of the desk, with a little printer stand on the side, really didn't work with the bigger monitor.  So I decided to move my new computer over to my former craft desk, which hasn't actually been used for anything other than lounging cats, in the five years we have lived here.  Well that's not quite true -- I sewed some window valances three years ago, but that's about it.

I love this layout already.  There's more actual desktop, so I've got room for some desk accessories and when I want to pay bills, I don't have to shuffle things between my lap, the desk and the drawer.

So what am I working on with my new iMac?

Well, at the art show last weekend, I was talking with one of the other artists and we talked about a scene where a cowboy would be up on a ridge, surveying the scene below, perhaps with a herd of cattle or bison or something.

The thing is, when I started playing around in DAZ and started working on posing the Genesis figure on the DAZ horse, I ended up with the cowboy looking back behind him, and leaning his hand on his horse's rump, like he's waiting for the rest of the riders (or perhaps his trusty sidekick, Tonto) to catch up!  (Thank you to Judy Adamson, a fellow artist who lives in Wales, who came up with the subtitle when I first posted the finished render on Facebook, asking for suggestions for titles)

Once I had the horse and rider the way I wanted them, I saved them as a wavefront object which I would then be able to import into a variety of other 3D graphic software.

Then I opened up Vue, the software I use for creating landscapes and scenery.  I created a foreground terrain and added some weeds and grass to it and placed the horse and rider in the scene, being sure to make sure they weren't either floating three inches above the ground, or sinking down into it.  Then I grouped horse and rider together with the foreground terrain and camera and raised everything up above the ground plane and tilted it forward slightly, to give the illusion of standing on the edge of the ridge looking into the valley. (You can see that grouping in the top right hand segment of the photo below).

Vue gives you four different views at once, so you can see your scene from the front, from the side, from the top and finally, the "camera view".   This will be what you see in the final render - it's the view on the bottom right.

Once I had the horse and rider standing on the ridge, with the valley spread out below, I set about finding a suitable atmosphere for the scene. Vue has a multitude of atmospheres built in, or you can set about creating your own by manually adding layers of cloud, positioning the sun, setting the lighting model and many other functions.

For this scene, I selected one of the atmosphere presets and the moved the sun around until it appears that horse and rider are being highlighted from the side by the sun as it moves lower in the western sky.

I adjusted the levels in Photoshop Elements 11 as the shadows were just too dark in the original render that came out of Vue.  I'm very happy with the result.

Digital Artists Who Inspire Me

There are a number of online communities for digital artists: Deviant Art, Renderosity, Cornucopia 3D to name but three.

Each site has hundreds, if not thousands of member artists, many of whom inspire others and give of themselves by creating tutorials for other artists, and also providing content, such as materials and backgrounds, for others to use in their own work. 

This week, I thought I would share with you three of my favorite digital artists.

Gill Brooks  
Digital artists not only have to have the normal artistic skills such as composition and a sense of proportion and perspective, but they also have to learn the technical aspects of working with which ever program they use.  Gill, who hails from England, has been working in Vue since 2002, long before I had ever heard of it.

I love her work, some of which is fantasy art, such as the image I have shown above, called "Follow Me" and some is inspired by the scenery and landscapes of England.

I have some materials created by Gill in my own "digital toolbox", in the form of some very realistic water textures that I have used in a number of my own pieces.

You can view Gill's portfolio on Cornucopia here.
You can view her gallery on Renderosity here.

Dominic Davison
Another English artist I admire is Dominic Davison.  His works make me think of a digital version of Thomas Kinkade.  His attention to the smallest detail and the quality of his lighting make every one of his images picture perfect.

Even when I use the exact same 3D models in my own art, I can't get anywhere near this quality yet, but I'll keep trying!

You can view Dominic's portfolio on Cornucopia here.
You can view his gallery on Renderosity here.

Flint_Hawk
I don't know what Flint_Hawk's real name is, just the "handle" they go by on Renderosity.  I'm not even sure if it's a he or a she!!

Flint_Hawk does some wonderful fantasy art in Poser, and a lot of it includes horses - my favorite subject!.

As with many of the artists on Renderosity, Flint-Hawk helpfully posts details of how they composed their image, which textures they use, details of any extra models they have used and where one can get them.

Renderosity members can view Flint-Hawks's gallery by searching for Flint_Hawk at www.renderosity.com.  The artist asked me not to post a direct link.

Each of these artists, as well as many others, have inspired me in my art.  Which could be why I don't seem to have my own unique style... but that's another blog post.

Which artists have inspired you?

Do You Believe in Fairies?

A few years ago, I came upon the most delightful book at a lunch-hour book fair in the downtown Houston building I worked in. It's called "Fairyopolis, A Flower Fairies Journal."

As you open the first page of the book, you can see immediately that it is quite enchanting, being the summer journal of Cicely Mary Barker, famed for her Flower Fairy portraits.

From her handwritten note on the inside cover, you can see that she kept the journal during the summer of 1920 while staying at the home of a friend and then sent it to the British Faerie Folklore Society, to be looked after and preserved after certain incidents led her to believe that she might have witnessed fairy activity!   

It's the kind of journal I've always wanted to keep, hand written in a neat script, with notes, sketches, lists, little envelopes with secret finds and so much more.

I had the most enjoyable afternoon on Saturday, recovering from a head cold, and sitting in the garden listening to the songs of the birds, and the hum of the bees and wondering if possibly the Wee Folk were watching me from behind the jasmine vine :-)

As the sun went down and a chill crept into the air, I felt compelled to create a fairy scene myself. Only I would do it using my computer, instead of my paintbrush. I was looking for my finished piece to have a vintage feel to it, reminiscent of Cicely's own flower Fairies.

Here is the finished article - "The Curious Fairy".  I'm thrilled with how she came out and hope that others like her too.