Creating A CityScape In Corel Painter - by Debbie

A while back, Beckett mentioned that I do Daily Doodles. I post some of these on DebbieOhi.com, but some I just keep to myself.

I find that drawing something purely for the fun of it every day helps keep the joy in my art (including work-related art). Sometimes I do a quick sketch while other times I take longer and do some experimenting.

Today, I decided to experiment more with textures and layers. Most of my pieces are created entirely digitally, and I did this one in Corel Painter. Just in case some of you out there have Corel Painter, I'm going to mention some of the specific brushes that I used.

First I created a layer above the Canvas and colored it a pale blue. In the top half of the image, I used the Sponge brush (one of my faves!) and several color to create a textured sky. Next, using the Flat Color brush, I drew a silhouette of the cityscape.

I selected Preserve Transparency in the cityscape layer so I would only affect the silhouette, then used the Sponge brush again to add more color.

After adding some windows with the Chalk brush, I copied the cityscape layer, flipped it, then pasted on top of the previous cityscape layer, dragged it down lower and offset a bit horizontally to give the impression of more buildings.

Then I selected the cityscape layer in the back, copied it,  and flat-colored the copy entirely grey. I also decided to experiment a bit with a watercolor effect near the bottom with the "Just Add Water" variant of the Blend brush:

The background grey layer looks ugly, right? But remember that this grey layer is directly on TOP of the real cityscape layer. Watch what happens when I select Gel for how this layer interacts with its neighbors:

Pretty cool, eh?

At this point I realize that the whole watercolor thing doesn't really work, so I crop the image to cut off a lot of the bottom. I also use the Sponge brush to add some clouds in the sky:

But what to do about the weird-looking watercolor bit at the bottom? My solution: COVER IT UP!

I use the Flat Color brush and use a generic green. Well, maybe the green's a little bright for this picture but that's okay -- I can mute it down with more Sponge paint:

Voilà!

My overall advice: Don't let yourself get in a creative rut -- experiment on a regular basis. If you have your own creative experiments (in whatever medium) online, feel free to post the URL below!