Posted on

Sketching with an intuos wacom tablet, stylus and Painter software

It is so much fun to draw on the computer using a wacom tablet, stylus and Painter12 software.
This is what my stylus and tablet look like.

The tablet plugs into one’s computer, and the software is installed on the computer.

The stylus and tablet are pressure sensitive, so it gives a very similar line quality to sketching with a pen on paper.

Painter12 is really forgiving. You can work in layers, so that you can go back and adjust opacity, erase from a specific set of marks or draw underneath marks.

I am usually sketching referencing photos that I take during the day. I have a big enough monitor that I can pull up a photo and work on the sketch right beside it. Working on the computer, I can also zoom in to the photo to see more detail – which is really great if you have eyesight like mine. I feel like I’m sculpting the drawing, it takes so many different lines drawn for me to find the shapes that I like.

Here’s an example of how a drawing progresses.

Here is what the software looks like with the layer, brush and color pallets open.

 

This is where I stopped.

When I first started my daily sketching, I tried not to spend much more than an hour on a sketch, but now, I give myself permission to draw all evening if that is what I feel like doing.

 

Posted on

Artist portfolio layouts

My name is Heather Goff. I work as a web designer/programmer, but my background is in the arts. My resolution to create “a doodle a day” and post it to this blog was an effort to flex my artistic brain a bit and balance the programming that I do.

The added benefit to creating the “doodle a day” WordPress site is that it has given me the perfect platform to develop custom WordPress portfolio layouts for artists.

I am building on a theme created by Organic Themes. The theme already came with three portfolio page layouts, a one column, two column and three column layout, but I wanted to arrange the artwork in a more traditional arrangement.

This morning I figured out how to use a jquery code that I found on codrops (view code here) and adapted it to work in WordPress.

I am pulling the photos attached to posts of specific categories (passing the category parameter to the page) and ordering them randomly. When the page first loads, you get a grid of of all your images in a specific post category. If you mouse over the thumbnails they highlight.

And when you click on a thumbnail, it zooms larger, and you can paginate through them.

I am very excited to have figured out this code.

First I had to figure out how to retrieve just the URL of the specific image size attached to a post. I used a variation on the code found here.

Now I have three different custom layouts I’ve created for artists.

This one I call the standard portfolio layout. I have the default category page displaying this way.

This standard art portfolio layout displays the number of posts you set in your reading settings in the dashboard.

And then yesterday, I figured out how to pass the category parameter to a slide show page, that loops between the images and shows the title of the image.

I modified the jquery code that I found here.

 

Anyway, I’m having a lot of fun combining the drawing with the programming in this site.