An increasing number of artists, even those firmly committed to working in traditional media, are discovering the value of adding digital painting and drawing tools to their repertoire.

The transition can be daunting, though, with some artists feeling intimidated by what they perceive as complex and expensive digital art tools and the implied learning curve.

There are smaller, easier to use alternatives, however, that can make the dive into digital art simpler and require less of an up-front investment.

One of them is ArtRage, a digital painting and drawing application by Ambient Design that represents an inexpensive alternative to the industry standard digital painting and drawing applications like Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop (I might include Manga Studio Pro as a standard at this point as well).

I received a review version of ArtRage3 Studio Pro, and as someone with both an eye to the needs of novice digital painters and a long personal history of creating digital art in both Painter and Photoshop, I put it through its paces.

Though not strictly necessary, ArtRage is meant, like those other tools, to be used with a pressure sensitive tablet and stylus when drawing and painting. (Wacom’s Bamboo Pen model [more here] allows for basic pressure sensitive pen input for about $70 U.S.)

ArtRage features digital emulations of painting and drawing tools for oils, watercolor, pencil, ink, airbrush, chalk and others. The Studio Pro version, which is what I tested, features layers and layer groups, layer blend modes, support for plug-in fliters, importing and exporting custom brush settings and a range of surprisingly sophisticated capabilities for its modest price.

The most direct competition for ArtRage might be AutoDesk’s Sketchbook Pro, though I don’t have a copy of that for comparison. Another relevant application would be Corel Painter Essentials.

Despite a vaguely toy-like interface and inclusion of craft store sillyness like a “Glitter” tool, ArtRage in actual use defies your initial impressions and becomes a surprisingly powerful tool, suitable for creating serious digital artwork.

The application’s strongest point is the drawing and painting tools themselves, particularly the default oil painting brush, which I think is among the best in the industry, and the pen and pencil tools, which are at least as good as the tools from the more expensive counterparts.

Add to that features like layers, layer transparency, layer groups, Photoshop standard blend modes, and the additional capabilities in ArtRage Studio Pro for extra painting tools, selection tools and filters, and you have a very capable digital art tool for a very reasonable price.

The downside, from my point of view, is the quirky and sometimes frustrating interface design, in which the designers have felt it necessary to be clever and original, sometimes at the expense of ease of use.

Many aspects of the interface are clear enough, like the palette of tools and the color picker, and many of the tools are actually easier to use than their counterparts in the more expensive applications, which can sometimes be bewildering to novice users.

However, there are other convention-defying interface design choices that seem different for the sake of being different rather than “different because we think we have a better way to do this”. (I happen to be a fan of the controversial interfaces Kai Krause and Phil Clevenger designed for the mid-90′s Metacreations applications like Bryce and Poser, so I don’t object to non-standard interfaces out of hand).

I initially found it maddening that I couldn’t use some simple UI conventions like “Select All” and “Delete” that are an expected function in any digital graphics application. This frustration was eventually mollified as I began to assign custom key commands (e.g. creating a custom key command for “Clear Layer” as a substitute for Select All and Delete).

The pop-up palettes for things like layers, presets, color swatches and tool settings are fine, even if they waste a bit of screen space on design elements, but I found it mildly annoying that the tool palette and color picker are part of the canvas. They can be hidden easily enough with a key command, and automatically disappear when using a tool in their corners, but cannot be moved or pulled off of the canvas as far as I can tell.

The tool and color palette arrangement is reminiscent of the old versions of Alias Sketchbook (now AutoDesk Sketchbook), but even they have moved to a more conventional tool and color palette arrangement in current versions.

The ArtRage tools themselves, however, once accessed, are a joy to use.

I found them easier to adjust and tweak (certainly for a novice) than comparable tools in Painter and Photoshop; and in general superbly implemented in terms of their action and response.

The pencil tool took much less tweaking on my part to produce a sketchy, light line for preliminary layout, easily adjusted for heavier lines (as if going from a 2h to a 2b in traditional pencil work). The pen tool (interestingly represented in the tool palette by the image of a technical pen instead of a steel quill) is smooth and fluid, with a nice response to pressure sensitivity.

The airbrush behaves well, the camel hair brush and marker tools have the necessary basic settings to make them suitable for speed painting and the creation of digital concept art.

The oil painting brush, in the way it lays down colors over other colors, blends and gives the appearance of blended brush strokes, is terrific. I like it better than any of the default oil brushes in Corel Painter (and I’m a big fan of Painter’s brushes in general), and, like many of the ArtRage tools, it’s just easier to use “out of the box”.

Those who are used to Painter and Photoshop’s more sophisticated brush engines may find some elements of the brush controls limited, but for someone who is just diving into digital art, ArtRage provides a less confusing range of options while allowing a good deal of control and flexibility.

ArtRage Studio Pro is able to import and export a variety of image formats, including (within limitations for some advanced features) layered Photoshop files.

There are a series of tutorials on the ArtRage website to get you started, and there is an ArtRage user community — the webite includes user forums and galleries.

ArtRage Studio Pro is inexpensive (as of this writing, $80 U.S.), and an excellent value given its capabilities. It can be a great place for novice digital artists to start, but is powerful enough for professionals to turn out finished work, as in the two images by Pakistani visual development artist, Waheed Nasir, above.

There are two other versions, both more limited in features, but even less expensive, as you step down: ArtRage 3 Studio (currently $40 U.S.) and Art Rage 2.6 ($20 U.S.). All are available for Mac and Windows. You can upgrade from the lesser versions to the more full featured ones.

There is a brief overview of the versions and features here, and a link at the bottom of the top section of this page to a more complete PDF listing of the differences in features between the versions.

I would certainly recommend that anyone interested in digital art give ArtRage a try, even if you are already comfortable with one of the more expensive tools.

There is a full-featured (but limited export) 30 day demo version of ArtRage 3 Studio Pro available for download.

However, I might suggest downloading their free, limited-feature but unlimited use, ArtRage 2.6 Starter Edition first (link at bottom of this page). This is much more limited than any of the other versions, but you can use it to acquaint yourself with the eccentricities of the interface, and then download and evaluate the full featured but time limited demo of ArtRage Studio Pro; so you don’t waste demo time getting used to the interface.

Even experienced Painter and Photoshop users may find, as I do, that its small memory footprint, quick launch time and sophisticated drawing and painting tools make ArtRage a valuable addition to your digital toolbox.

I continue to work extensively in Painter and Photoshop, but ArtRage has become my favored tool to open up quickly and make sketches or visual notes, and to play with casual digital paintings when I have a few minutes between deadlines.

For those who are looking to make the leap into digital painting, it can be a great place to start.

[Addendum: Cédric Trojani was kind enough to let me know that you can indeed separate the tools and colors palettes from the document area by right-clicking (Windows) or Control-clicking (Mac) on the grabber icon in each corner to access a contextual menu. For more see Cédric's comments on this post. So the key is really just to familiarize yourself with the ArtRage interface. The more I learn about it, the more flexible and adaptable it becomes.]

Karl Paul Themistocles von Eckenbrecher (sometimes spelled Themistokles) was a German landscape and marine artist active in the late 19th and early 20 centuries.

Born to a German Father and Italian mother while they were traveling in Athens, he he was largely schooled by private tutors as they traveled and moved often. The family eventually moved to Dussseldorf, where Von Eckenbrecher was able to study with noted professor of landscape painting Oswald Achenbach.

He became fascinated with sailing ships, which would eventually become a recurring theme in his paintings.

As an adult, he continued his family’s interest in other places, and traveled extensively throughout Europe, particularly in Norway, and the Middle East. He also visited farther destinations like Africa and the Philippines, returning with subjects for dramatic landscapes and scenes of exotic locations.

Web resources for Von Eckenbrecher are scattered; I’ve listed what I could find below.

It’s a fairly common practice among comics artists to publish “sketchbooks”, sometimes literally that, sometimes collections of more finished drawings. In them we can often see the artist at play, doing preliminary sketches for art from stories with which we’re familiar, indulging in imaginative flights of fancy, doodling, practicing and learning.

Rarely do we get to see this kind of work from comic art masters like Al Williamson.

Flesk Publications has come through again with a beautiful first volume in what I hope will be an extended series of books, Al Williamson Archives Volume 1. Flesk sent me a review copy, and I’m really impressed with the book.

Williamson’s approach was often very finished, with his beautiful drawing and elegant ink lines brought to a state of delicate balance between informal fluidity and refined polish; but here we get to see his drawings more as drawings, both in pencil and in ink, in various states of finish.

We get to see Williamson as draftsman, as playful inventor, as restless craftsman and as dedicated student of the art of graphic storytelling.

There are sketches and drawings from all phases of his career — science fiction heroes, dinosaurs and spooky swamps from the EC Comics days, ERB Tharks, studies of Rip Kirby, Secret Agent Corrigan and of course Flash Gordon. There are also projects I wasn’t aware of, like an unfinished page for an 8 page Xenozoic Tales story on which he and Mark Schultz were collaborating.

Sketchbooks like these are a bonanza for students of the art form, in that you get to see a master of the art as he works and learns and refines his craft. Here we see Williamson learning from Alex Raymond, who he admired greatly, and the influences from his friends and associates, Roy Krenkel, Wally Wood and Frank Frazetta, as well as sketches, both playful and businesslike, in which he works out solutions to challenges of composition, anatomy and rendering.

The book, as with all of Flesk’s books, is beautifully produced, but Flesk has gone beyond that, with an archivist’s eye and a fan’s enthusiasm, in the accurate presentation of the sketches and drawings on the original paper on which they were drawn.

Whether yellowed with age, wrinkled, cracked or touched up with white-out, Flesk has resisted the temptation to adjust levels, “clean up” the drawings and print them monochromatically on a white background; presenting them instead as full color images of the originals. It’s as if you were lovingly picking them up out of Williamson’s flat file drawer, discovering one long lost treasure after another.

You can see a preview of some of the drawings on the Flesk website, where you can also order the book directly from the new Flesk Publications online store, or by old fashioned snail mail.

Every field of artistic endeavor has its own limitations, but it’s often within those limitations, rather than in spite of them, that artists do their best work.

In gallery art, artists who wish to survive on the sale of their art must produce work that finds an appreciative audience of buyers, and must often please gallery owners first in order to receive exposure.

Illustration has a special limitation in that the work must accompany and help express the themes, scenes or intention of a literary work, and must please editors as well as the public.

Scientific illustration brings with it the often stringent restriction that, in addition many of the challenges inherent in creating representational art, the work must adhere to scientific accuracy. This includes fields like botanical illustration, medical illustration, and that most popularly recognized branch of scientific art, paleontological illustration.

Paleo art carries even more restrictions, in that the artists are attempting to create realistic and scientifically accurate reconstructions of animals that no one has ever seen.

The importance of scientific accuracy in paleo art has led to a the creation of a special prize, awarded by the scientists themselves, for “outstanding achievement in paleontological scientific illustration and naturalistic art”. Named after, and partly supported by, noted paleo art collector John J. Lanzendorf, the Lanzendorf Paleoart Prize is awarded each year in October by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The 2-Dimensional Art category of the Lanzendorf Prize was most recently awarded to the “Hell Creek” mural at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Created by Robert F. Walters, who I previously profiled here, and his partner, Tess Kissinger, with help from artist Laura Fields, the 92 ft long and 15 ft high (28 x 4.5 metre) mural depicts a scene from the end of the Cretaceous Period, just before the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. It is named for the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota, where fossils of many of the species portrayed have been found.

You can read an article, Hell Creek Mural Wins Lanzendorf Prize, on Discovery News, and see the accompanying large image of the entire mural here.

You can also see images from the mural on the Walters & Kissinger DinoArt.com website.

Walters and Kissinger head one of the worlds premier dinosaur art studios, as well as the more broad-based Walters & Kissinger Museum Illustration Studio. The prize comes just two years after they were awarded the 2007 Lanzendorf prize for the Morrison Foundation mural that is part of the same exhibit, and is also, at 180 ft x 15 ft (54 x 4.5 metres) the largest dinosaur mural in the world.

I’ve known Walters and Kissinger for a number of years, so I was privy to some of the additional challenges presented by the scale and scope of the mural in much more detail than usual.

Installed in the newly redesigned Dinosaurs in their Time installation of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the mural was required to incorporate a number of species of animals and prehistoric plants that existed at the time in a single panoramic scene (paleo artists, in addition to the portrayal of prehistoric animals, often must serve as botanical artists as well).

The mural also had to work within the physical structure of the museum building and the layout of the exhibit design. Also, in a way perhaps analogous to the Renaissance artists who had to answer to the Church in terms of the specific and minute details of how a scene was to be portrayed, modern paleo artists answer to the rigorous analysis of the scientists who study the animals and plants to be portrayed.

The specifications of the Hell Creek mural, as outlined by the scientists working on the project, required not only specific plants and animals, but required that the animals reflect the skeleton mountings in the museum’s collection. In many cases these skeletons are mounted directly in front of the section of the mural showing that animal, and the painting must accommodate the skeleton, as well as physical models of plants, as though they were extensions of the mural, working together to create an illusionistic space for the visitor (image above, bottom).

In addition, the mural incorporates the latest scientific findings in terms of the probable physical appearance of the animals, something that is constantly changing as new discoveries are made. The triceratops (the familiar three-horned dinosaurs that are the stars of the mural) incorporate a skin texture interpreted from a fossil impression of triceratops skin discovered less than a year before. Likewise the oviraptorosaur, the animal with a beak and bony crest on it’s head in the middle image, incorporates feathers from research on an earlier oviraptorosaur find in China.

So in addition to working within the restrictions of scientific accuracy, paleo artists must also play detective, piecing together bits of knowledge from scattered sources to recreate the best possible vision of the animal.

The artists were able to incorporate some elements to surprise and delight, as well. Almost hidden in the foliage away from the more dramatic animals, are smaller creatures, like the avisaurus, a primitive bird with teeth that flies through the forest canopy just above and to the right of the triceratops, and the didelphodon, a badger-sized marsupial mammal moving through the underbrush, almost unnoticed at the right of the triceratops’ feet.

The late Cretaceous Period was a time when flowering plants came to prominence, and Walters told me that he took special delight in the portrayal of the group of edmontosaurs (the “duck-billed” dinosaurs to the left of the triceratops) in a field of flowers that resembled modern buttercups. Much of the other flora displayed is also recognizable as familiar modern plants that began to appear in that period.

Paleo artists have help, of course, in the reconstruction of extinct animals, working with the paleontologists who discover and study them, but even that has its limitations. The definition of paleontologist is one who studies ancient life, but not all paleontologists are anatomists, knowledgeable about the skeletal and muscular functioning of modern animals.

Having studied human anatomy in sessions at the medical college of Thomas Jefferson University while a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Walters places a great deal of emphasis on accurate animal anatomy in his paleontological life reconstruction art.

The challenge, of course, was to take all of these considerations, scientific restrictions and requirements and mold them into a dynamic composition that immerses us in another time, in the orange glow of a sunset that presages the end of the reign of the dinosaurs.

So when artists think they are working within too many restrictions, they might consider the additional challenges in artistic fields where science is the salon jury.

Well, the “Liquid Pencil” turned out to be a dud, so how about a more modest bit of pencil inventiveness?

Most of us who use wooden drawing pencils have experienced the stub problem; once your wooden pencil is worn down to a stub that’s too small to comfortably use, what do you do with it? (You can’t just waste all of that wonderful, not to mention expensive, graphite goodness.)

The usual tack is some kind of pencil holder or extension, but these are often awkward, a bit too thick and not as nice as the experience of drawing with a fresh, new wooden pencil.

Well the Continuous Pencil concept from Yanko Design seeks to resolve that, and looks to be a clever and quite workable solution.

The Continuous Pencil is essentially modular, each pencil has a hollow end, into which will fit the thin graphite-filled extension on the business end of the new pencil, essentially forming a new whole that can be sharpened with sharpener or knife, as would be a new single pencil.

So far it’s just a concept, but it’s nice to see even the humble pencil being rethought in imaginative ways.

“What about just using a mechanical pencil?”, you ask. Well, they’re nice for some kinds of drawing, (and there are some nice new variations on that idea, like the Uni-ball Kuru Toga Pencil that mechanically rotates the tip as you draw to keep it sharp), but they don’t do much for those of us who like to draw with a knife-sharpened, chiseled or sanded point in all of its glorious variations.

For that, try moving up from a mechanical pencil a 2mm lead holder.

[Via Wired's Gadget Lab]

I’ve written before about ImagineFX, a UK based magazine devoted primarily to 2D digital art (“digital painting”) for the fantasy, science fiction and concept art fields.

Almost every issue of the magazine I’ve every seen has had articles of interest to me, (and ImagineFX is one of those magazines, like Illustration magazine, in which even the ads are relevant and interesting); but I found Issue #60 (September 2010) to be of particular interest for a number of reasons.

In addition to the cornucopia of news from the field, pointers to interesting topics on the web, artist questions and answers, reviews of computer graphics software and hardware, how-to workshops, and the discovery of at least two artists new to me that I will be profiling in the future, the issue includes several feature articles about (or by) artists I’ve previously featured here on Lines and Colors.

William Stout is profiled in a several page article, illustrated with art from his beautiful new book Hallucinations (which I reviewed here) and his previous recent book Dinosaur Discoveries (which I reviewed here), along with other work from his illustrious career.

Goro Fujita, who I profiled here, contributes a three page article on Digital Painting on the iPad with the Brushes app.

James Gurney, who I have featured in several posts on Lines and Colors, highlights the Workshops section of the issue with a terrific 6 page article on The Science Behind Visual Perception, that is alone worth the cover price of the magazine. This includes material adapted from Gurney’s upcoming book, Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter. There is a post about the ImagineFX article on Gurney’s always fascinating blog, Gurney Journey.

There are good-size digital files of the images from the articles by Gurney and Fujita on the DVD that accompanies the issue. This also includes a ton of resources, including images from other articles and workshops, a hi-resolution texture pack, over 700 female figure reference pose photos and trial versions of Painter 11, ZBrush 3.1 and ArtRage 3. (I’ll be reviewing ArtRage 3 in an upcoming post.)

As part of a nine page “Back to Basics” section on topics like Texture, Digital File Formats, Layers, and Figure Drawing Basics, Justin Gerard, who I profiled here, contributes a short article on Composition for Beginners,.

Oh yes, and as part of that same section, yours truly contributes a short column on Art Terms and Questions, in which I explain some commonly misunderstood art terms like “chiaroscuro”, “negative space”, “simultaneous contrast”, “chroma” and “lost and found edges” (page 61, right column).

ImagineFX #60 is currently on sale in the U.S. and Canada (in the UK, it’s last month’s issue, which can be purchased from the website as a back issue).

The ImagineFX website is also a huge resource of archived articles, galleries, workshops, forums, reviews and downloads.

It has long been an established practice for artists to study the paintings and drawings of artists from the past by creating their own copies of the masters’ work. Ju Duoqi just happens to use vegetables as her medium.

Her “Vegetable Museum” is a series in which she has arranged vegetables, fresh and otherwise, chosen for their form, textural qualities, tone and color, to recreate famous works from some of Western art’s great masters. The results, particularly if you are familiar with the original work, are amusing, often hilarious, as well as being visually yummy for their own compositional characteristics.

Duoqi, who was born in Chongqing, China and studied at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, found herself rearranging vegetables in the bins at market stalls, seeing in the arrangments bits of imagery.

She put some together in her first old master study by recreating Eug&eqcute;ne Delacroix’s La Liberté Guidant le Peuple (“Liberty Leading the People”) as La Liberté Guidant les Légumes (essentially,”Liberty Leading the Beans”).

Duoqi chooses from a variety of vegetables in various states, fresh, rotten, withered, dried, pickled, fried, boiled and otherwise prepared, carefully arranges them, photographs the arrangement and then digitally manipulates the results. The final pieces are printed in limited editions.

In addition to The Vegetable Museum, the Galerie Paris-Beijing, which handles her work, has an exhibit of The Fantasies of Chinese Cabbage, images of cheesecake pictures of women (including Marylyn Monroe’s iconic Playboy centerfold) created out of the aforementioned vegetable. These are particularly interesting for the way she has used the striations of the cabbage in defining the forms, plus they’re also frequently hilarious.

The Vegetable Museum series, as I pointed out, is best enjoyed in comparison to the originals. Images above: Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Ilya Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga, Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy and Gustav Klimpt’s The Kiss.

(Also, for more on those artists, see my posts on Rembrandt [also here], Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Ilya Repin, Henri Rousseau and Gustav Klimt.)

So far, Duoqi has resisted the temptation to create any (possibly recursive) homages to the vegetable-as-image paintings of Guisepe Arcimboldo.

[Via Sandbox World]

Pennsylvania artist Barbara Kacicek favors a few subjects to which she returns frequently. One is small still life subjects, particularly pears, plums and smooth river stones. Another is compositions of clouds, often mounded and towering cumulus clouds.

To these she adds drawings that veer away from realism into “Imaginary Realism”, done with smooth tones of charcoal on bristol board.

Her still life paintings, though brought to a fairly high level of finish, are painted alla prima, in oil on canvas mounted on panels. She finds compositional focus in the textural surfaces of her subjects as well as their subtle colors.

I particularly enjoy her series of “31 Meditations on Three Plums“, in which she approaches the same basic subject repeatedly on small canvas (6×6 inches), with variations on composition of the plums against a striped cloth background in a variety of lighting choices.

When viewing her website, note that there are additional works in the Archive section. There is also a section of oil pastels, in which she explores the cloud theme, but with the different textural effect afforded by the medium. Kacicek also features her charcoal drawings on a separate site.