3-1 Digital Painting

3-1

Digital painting 

When deciding what to do for this assignment, I really wanted to challenge myself. I have had a lot of experience in digital collage, but I have never attempted to do a digital painting before. To be honest, I have always been too intimidated to try one. Painting and drawing realistically have been points of fear for since childhood. Luckily, my friend who teaches digital painting and design at NYPL was over while I was painting. 

To get inspiration for a fantastical landscape I dipped into one of my favorite books, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. The book contains short vignettes of moments of life in fantastical cities. It is revealed throughout the book that each of these wondrous cities are all the same city, and are just different moments from a complex and diverse place. Here are two passages from the book that inspired me.  


"When a man rides a long through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made...he was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora therefore, is the city of his dreams; with on difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is a wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories." 


"But what is certain is that if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines, with its pilings and its suspended stairways, a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first model" 


The second passage made me think about where I grew up (by the ocean in Southern Massachusetts) and that when I fantasize about an idealized version of my future home, it is always derived from childhood landscapes. Growing up, I spent my entire summers swimming in the ocean. Sometimes when I look at the ocean horizon, I just want to jump in and keep swimming. See how far I can get. The water is so inviting. I wanted to bring all of these elements together in my digital painting to create a landscape of what I might find if I never stopped swimming. 




I had lots of fun painting the water and using the blending brushes. I also really liked how you could bring in images and paint over them and create and hide multiple compositions. I very much enjoyed the flexibility of the medium. 



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