Amateur aerospace artist

Dear gentlemen,

My wife paints for fun, she's not a professional artist. I recently asked her to try aerospace painting. I've attached the resulting work, still unfinished, to ask for feedback. Depending on your opinions I can encourage her to go on with more unbuilt projects or just return to conventional subjects.

Compliments to your wife...a very nice start. If she's up to it, I wouldn't mind seeing more aerospace art from her.

Quite good! The only issue I have with it is the lettering... the "font" is off. Other than that... I much prefer painted work (even digitally painted) to computer rendering... just look better IMO.

Very good!

Excellent! She picked a good subject and rendered it beautifully. If she takes requests, can she do Isinglass?

So. . .Orion makes it available to subscribers and then one goes and uploads it to the web? Not cool.

nice painting B)

The obligatory question should be if she has a free sister But seriously, this is nice! As Scott mentioned, there are a few minor details that require correction, but considering she is not devoted to aerospace, the result is cool.

nice work, do more !

Thank you very much for all the comments, I'm sure that we could enjoy more unbuilt project paintings in the future. And why not, we accept suggestions. Since I like to produce original drawings for fun, the plan is drawing for me and painting for she. The problem is we have little time for art, our jobs have nothing to do with art and we have a little daughter who takes a lot of attention from us. But we are still young so stay tuned.

to sferrin,

Your comment left me a bit worried. Please let me explain. It was far from my intentions to do any cause any damage to Scott Lowther work or any of his subscribers. In fact I'm one of them. I have the full original APR run, many of its docs and I'm collecting eAPR as well. I apologize for that and I'll try to demonstrate that I had no obscure intentions. The picture I've posted here is not a colored file version of the subscribers-only 4 Mb hi-rez file. Mr Lowther also posted a 270 Kb file for free in his unwanted blog:

http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=12294

We toke this free file and opened it into Art Rage (http://www.artrage.com/). With the help of a Wacom tablet (http://intuos.wacom.com/) outlined a sketch of the aircraft into a blank canvas and started to paint it. The painting technique emulated is soft pastel because that's the same technique my wife works when painting on real canvas.
The background in my wife's painting is original so that's not a Scott Lowther's high fidelity copycat. I see it just as a interpretation.Besides, the file I've posted is unfinished, it still needs to be polished. The main subject lacks its weapons load and the secondary subject remains just sketched and unpainted. Finally I kept the quality and therefore the file weight in a similar value, just 360 Kb which is really far from the subscribers-only 4 Mb hi-rez file.
Probably it was a mistake to choose an existing drawing as a model to test my wife painting skills, but I had no time to draw a totally original subject for her. My apologies again if you feel damaged. If this can help, you can be sure that we are not going to share the finished painting at any resolution.

Best regards,

Antonio

pometablava said:

Thank you very much for all the comments, I'm sure that we could enjoy more unbuilt project paintings in the future. And why not, we accept suggestions. Since I like to produce original drawings for fun, the plan is drawing for me and painting for she. The problem is we have little time for art, our jobs have nothing to do with art and we have a little daughter who takes a lot of attention from us. But we are still young so stay tuned.

to sferrin,

Your comment left me a bit worried. Please let me explain. It was far from my intentions to do any cause any damage to Scott Lowther work or any of his subscribers. In fact I'm one of them. I have the full original APR run, many of its docs and I'm collecting eAPR as well. I apologize for that and I'll try to demonstrate that I had no obscure intentions. The picture I've posted here is not a colored file version of the subscribers-only 4 Mb hi-rez file. Mr Lowther also posted a 270 Kb file for free in his unwanted blog:

http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=12294

We toke this free file and opened it into Art Rage (http://www.artrage.com/). With the help of a Wacom tablet (http://intuos.wacom.com/) outlined a sketch of the aircraft into a blank canvas and started to paint it. The painting technique emulated is soft pastel because that's the same technique my wife works when painting on real canvas.
The background in my wife's painting is original so that's not a Scott Lowther's high fidelity copycat. I see it just as a interpretation.Besides, the file I've posted is unfinished, it still needs to be polished. The main subject lacks its weapons load and the secondary subject remains just sketched and unpainted. Finally I kept the quality and therefore the file weight in a similar value, just 360 Kb which is really far from the subscribers-only 4 Mb hi-rez file.
Probably it was a mistake to choose an existing drawing as a model to test my wife painting skills, but I had no time to draw a totally original subject for her. My apologies again if you feel damaged. If this can help, you can be sure that we are not going to share the finished painting at any resolution.

Best regards,

Antonio

Click to expand...

I think what threw me was the large rez of the picture you uploaded. I'd thought you used the high rez original rather than scaling up the low rez one.

sferrin said:

So. . .Orion makes it available to subscribers and then one goes and uploads it to the web? Not cool.

Click to expand...

While I'd be a bit irked to find one of the hi-rez images reposted... even if this *had* been based on the high rez, it is essentially new art. It's clearly a complete re-work, and since it's done well, I'm in favor of it.

Thanks Scott

I'm favorably impressed by your wife's work, especially considering this was the first ever aviation piece of someone who doesn't have a particular taste for that subject matter.

By all means, tell her she ought to do more! I'll be thrilled to see what she comes up with next.

Your wife did an excellent job pometablava! You can at least safely say she has our support in making aerospace art!

Very nice indeed.

I'll be sending a PM with a minor critique and some suggested reading.

To everyone else, my comments will be supportive with suggestions on how to improve on what she's done here. I just don't think those comments should be made in the open like this when she doesn't know everyone who will be seeing them.

The Artist said:

I just don't think those comments should be made in the open like this...

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I can see it both ways. I'm not an artist, never will be, so such tips and suggestions wouldn't help me... but they might be helpful to others who *are* artists. So there may be value in posting *some* of your comments in the open. All I'd suggest, using my vast knowledge and experience in diplomatic subtlety, is to be... errr, diplomatic. To me the painting looks pretty durned spiffy; a few things could be tweaked, but I'd be proud as hell to have done that myself. Whatever helps spur good artists to do good aerospace art, I'm in favor of.

Fair enough.

I've already sent the PM. I'll publish here the suggestions but not my direct comments about the painting in question.

Look for paintings by Charles Thompson, Keith Ferris and Wilson Hurley (Wilson did mostly southwestern landscapes but he also did some aviation art) and look at what they each did with reflected light and color.

Anyone wanting to do aviation art or other themes of realist art would benefit by getting a copy of James Gurney's Color and Light A Guide for the Realist Painter. (Yes, the Dinotopia artist.) He uses examples from his full range of work to present easy to follow lessons on using light and color in your realist paintings.

Really nice!
Also my wife she's an amateur painter (but no aerospace subjects at all...).

The plane is right in front of me.... very well done.
Compliments to your wife Pome..

Seconded.

Good stuff!

The finished work. Here's a much reduced quality jpg from the original 21 Mb tiff file. We decided to delete the second aircraft present in the original painting.

Many thanks again for your help and support

Very Nice!!!!

Now it is flying within that background. I like it.

That's pretty good stuff. ;D

pometablava said:

Dear gentlemen,

My wife paints for fun, she's not a professional artist. I recently asked her to try aerospace painting. I've attached the resulting work, still unfinished, to ask for feedback. Depending on your opinions I can encourage her to go on with more unbuilt projects or just return to conventional subjects.

Click to expand...

One word: CON-TI-NUE !!!