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.

Created in Photoshop, this was the digital decalcomania source for the Leda Painting

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.