In May 2011, having only whetted my appetite by doing those quick Photoshop drawings, I was delighted when I was able to open up my new purchase of Corel Painter and begin tapping into its virtual brushes and techniques.
For my very first project, I started by creating an image in Photoshop of random colors and textures knowing that I would later use it as a hallucination field to inspire the finished digital painting. I opened it in Painter, saved it as .RIF (Painter’s proprietary file format) and started pushing the color around.
Very quickly I spotted the central figure’s face and torso and some duck-like heads. If you turn your head to the right while looking at this source image, you will quickly spot the Leda figure. By adapting for digital processes the method I had worked with for over 30 years (see my description of this process: “Not Just Fixed Likenesses of the Named World: WHY I MAKE IMAGES THAT ARE AS ELUSIVE AS THE SHAPES AND SWIRLS OF SWIFTLY MOVING WATER.”), I let the painting take on a life of its own. I locked in some of the imagery it was suggesting to me, then applied a few finishing touches to make it feel like a complete composition.

This image was created by responding to visual information in the digital decalcomania source image shown above.
More digital decalcomania projects completed using Painter to be posted soon.