Coffee

This piece and the previous one have really been an experiment in how to add painterly touches to my digital work. You might ask be asking yourself, “Well if he wants to make his work look painted then why doesn’t he just use real paint?” The simple answer is time.

I almost always start a piece with series of pencil sketches to create the bare bones of the idea I want to develop. From there I’ll go in to photoshop and refine the sketch over and over until I have a design that I think works. I terms of the image above I literally had the barista pouring milk into the coffee cup without the heart shape. This next part is why I tend to not to work traditionally.

If I was to have painted everything traditionally up to this point there would be very little room to change what I had made. I’m one of those people that struggles to do loads and loads of rough drawings (because I’m impatient and I want to make a start on my idea right away) and because of this inability to plan ahead, I would have had to start all over again in order to incorporate any new ideas I might have that may have showed up in the roughs (were I to do them… which I don’t).

The beauty of working digitally (at least for me) is that I can continue to iterate, redo, rework, and change canvas size without having to scrap pages or scrape oil paints off. In working this way I save myself an immense amount of time and materials. The added bonus to this is that I don’t have to get messy, clean brushes, palettes etc…

Don’t get me wrong, I love traditionally painted work and the mastery required to use it. I often play with the idea of using it more often as a part of my practice, and I don’t doubt for a moment that my work would be worth significantly more were I to paint in this way. However the pros of working digitally far outweigh the cons in my opinion, but that is after all, just MY opinion.

Cheers

Matt