Work in Progress

Here is an image of a work in progress- a large-scale digital landscape painting. When printed out at full size, this will be 20x36". This is the first digital piece that I've attempted on this big of a scale. My husband and I are buying our first house this summer, and I hope this turns out well, so I can showcase it on our new livingroom wall!

Pattern Design

The next direction I plan to take Nikasha Designs, in addition to the digital portraits, is pattern design. I've looked at a few tutorials on using Illustrator and Photoshop to assist the pattern-making process, and I made a sample pattern tonight. I'm quite happy with the ease of use for making the pattern. I think I'll be able to do what I've envisioned in my head.

What I did here tonight, is make some quick sketches of my boy Niko. I cut the paper in half each way, and reversed the sides, essentially separating it into quadrants and taping back into a whole. After the paper is taped back together again, I drew him again, filling the new middle of the paper, so that my pattern wouldn't look like a bunch of squares lined up.

After completing the drawing, I scanned him into my computer, and used live-trace in Adobe Illustrator to turn him into a vector drawing. This was a new tool for me, but it is really cool. I brought the vectorized drawing back into Photoshop, and added colors behind it.

In Photoshop, I defined my image as a pattern, then created a larger workspace, and filled it with my pattern. All in all, it was a pretty cool process. I think it will be simpler with a fully computer-created pattern, but I am happy with my first result. Here it is:

Happy New Year

Well, I took a holiday break without mentioning it, but I hope everyone is enjoying the new year. Here are my puppies wishing you happy holidays.