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How I made this: Painted in Corel Painter X with a canvas effect from real watercolor paper I photographed. I washed the paper in various stages with water: hard tooth, heavy wash, and course. That was maybe 10 difficult steps in itself, including that the virtual paper seamlessly tiles, the tiling is not obvious, and tone-balancing so that Painter (or anything else) can tweak the lighting to be softer or harsher. The painting is worked up from an iPhone 4 photo of what I thought was striking light over clouds and mountains. - 'Content-aware fill' and other transplanting trickery of street and construction objects out of the photo: http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/cs5/new-features/fill-content-aware/ - Corel Painter's 'Auto-paint' feature in batches of various brush paramaters I fed it, to overlay my own hand-painted work. The hand-painted part is digital watercolor cloning (of the photo), and oil cloning of a broad, messier under-painting (from the photo). - Photoshop layer mixing: oil under-painting, watercolor layer in dodge blend mode, auto-paint batches at 60 percent transparency. - All kinds of other layering and masking freakiness. Multiple layers of smart objects of multiple layers with clipping masks in Photoshop; and additionally including digital colored pencil. So this is mixed digital media in three fundamental layers, which are themselves composed of layers. Fundamentally it is a lower layer of oil, a middle layer of watercolor, and another top layer of oil. But it's like all the light in the watercolor dodged everything in the oil beneath it (which you cannot do in real life), while the oil layer on top of that is mixed as viscous material but very translucent--maybe you could do that in real life with a thinning agent? ~ A hoity-toity robot talks about this at http://s.earthbound.io/artgib - vB (2021) : recovered part of the feel of the original photo in Filter Forge watercolor and brush stroke filters, blended with custom varied noise layers x2 Filter Forge filters as alpha layers, and re-composited in Photoshop with saturation bump.

Originally published in 2011, refreshed for Earth Day 2021.

Mountain Landscape over Downtown Provo UT

I'm in love with what Corel Painter can do.

This work is the first I published on my journey into digital art starting in 2011, falling in love with possibilities of simulated media. The reference photograph was taken with an iPhone of all things. A lot of virtual watercolor, layering, hand painting and filters (including Filter Forge) went into this. 2592×1936, many details in image metadata.

2021-04-22 update: Ten years later, I thought it could use subtle added detail, color bump and less wash out of the layers. I refreshed this with updated watercolor effect and use of the original image subtly layered in. You may not notice the subtle-ish improvements unless you see the original image, which I've deleted because syndication kept using the old image.

Updated print available at http://www.imagekind.com/Mountain-landscape-over-downtown-Provo-UT-impress_art?IMID=8080956e-4b8f-43e5-be79-eb8971190aaa

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