Blue Flower

Blue Flower, T. Turner 2011

Even though I was gone for a while, I wasn't COMPLETELY unproductive. I was lucky enough to be able to get some time at work to create a piece of whatever I wanted as long as I used our computer software. I'm more confident in my painting skills, but I had never made a digital painting before! That's a whole different set of rules than I'm used to, but I understand the basics. In some ways it's almost better than using real paint! You can't ctrl+z standing at an easel or magically have an endless supply of the perfect paint color you mixed. I was particularly proud of this piece, so I thought that I should share it.

This was made solely with Adobe Photoshop. I've never considered myself someone that needs to achieve super realism, but I'll be damned if that doesn't look like a rose haha. I found a picture online
and used it as a reference for this piece. I worked in multiple photoshop layers to build up each "round" of petals in the flower. I created my own color palette to choose from, using a range of a few purples and blues. For the background, I started off with a layer of flat black. Then I used HUGE, really soft brushes (I think around 200 - 300pt) to lightly pat in colors of my choosing. I say "pat" because the brush strokes looked so soft on-screen that it looked like I was literally patting in powder, haha.

I consider this a companion piece to an oil painting of a flower that I did earlier this year (I will post it up very soon). So a bit of the background story here is that I have a sort of affinity towards flowers (what girl doesn't, right?). Flowers are colorful, beautiful, feminine, sensual, organic, fragrant...I could go on. These are words that I, and most other people, associate with flowers. That is how I'd like to be seen, even though I may not always think I'm deserving of it. Flowers don't curse or make crass jokes, but I would at least like to be thought of as fragrant! To me, the Blue Flower piece represents a certain serenity in my life, maybe even some hopefulness. The cooler colors and handling in the flower are intended to evoke a calmer tone. The bloom is full, healthy, and wide open. Always facing up. While the background colors are an aura of soft, colorful "light". I think all the elements came together well. I guess I still got "it" somewhat. Now if only I can master consistency...

What do you think?