No Brushes to Wash

"Joshua Trees, Full Moon" digital painting done with Sketchbook

Learning to paint digitally is an interesting process. In some ways it's like real oil or watercolor application, depending on the program. You can mix and layer colors, sharpen or blur edges and make a digital image look almost like a traditional art work. But in other ways making digital art is a deficient thing. There are all kinds of sensory inputs that are missing--no smell of linseed oil and turpentine, no feeling of unction in paint applied with a snappy bristle brush, no spreading watercolors into wet paper as washes go down in succession, no pastel dust. It's a slightly remote experience.

On the other hand, you can produce an effective and pleasing image with nearly all of the effects of real paint and none of the physical complications, mess or cleanup. This picture, "Joshua Trees, Full Moon," was based on an online image of the Joshua Tree National Park in California. I had read something about joshua trees and looked up the subject out of curiosity. Turns out these desert plants aren't trees at all but a kind of yucca that simply grow tall and have limited foliage since they live in dry climates. They have a bristly, forbidding appearance and in certain deserts are the tallest vegetation for miles.

The harsh sun-baked landscape and foliage of the desert southwest lent themselves to this nocturne, which I drew and painted on a Cintiq tablet using Sketchbook. I started with a graded background, added a layer for the full moon and another for the mountains and background, then another for the tree and low growth in the foreground, keeping the colors and values muted. The graded background served not only as sky but also as the desert plain stretching into the distance. The colors are mostly very dark reds and almost chroma-less yellows and greens, applied using the oil brush tool.

But no brushes to wash.