But I was looking at yesterday's work and thinking how like one of the classical fantasy paintings it is. I got to wondering how it would look if it had been painted on canvas. So...
It's a really cool technique -- you wouldn't believe how easy it actually is to do this in Serif and Irfanview. You basically set the fabric texture as an overlay with a 6o% transparency, and then export the composit to Irfanview for fine-fine-fine tuning of the gamma, contrast and color saturation.
It's also very true that you could do the whole thing in GIMP, but Serif is much more convenient ... difficult to describe, unless you're accustomed to both. There's things you do in GIMP and things you do in Serif, just because it's so much easier! And as for Irfanview ... well, it's just the best, when you want to fiddle with the colors, tones, gamma, sharpness, whatnot, of any image. It also has a tiny footprint, so it loads in a split second, whereas GIMP takes several minutes to load! (Also, I find that GIMP has a fundamental instability, it loves to crash or lock up if/when you have it loaded with give or more Photoshop brush sets. I love GIMP, it's true! But I need to have half a dozen brush sets loaded, and this makes the program too slow loading and too unstable to use it on a whim. Meanwhile, Irfanview loads in a split second and I don't remember it ever crashing. Ever.)
Now too much new art today, folks ... sorry! I'm having a struggle with my health, am buried in mountains of work, and we just had a computer die. It shut itself down after system upgrades and never started up again. So tomorrow we have to go and get a new system. Oh, my aching credit card!
But I do hope to be feeling better soon, and I should have tunneled my way out from under the mountains of work...
Jade, 10 November
Note: posted using MK's logon because right now I can't connect ... too weird...
