Pigment App: After 2 months

After two months of using the Pigment coloring app, I can say that I have really improved artistically! Pigment is my first artist community, and so seeing other artists and their work really made me rethink how I draw and paint. So the three ways I've most improved are in color theory, shading, and special effects.

COLOR THEORY: With my watercolor on real paper I noticed that colors were more vibrant if I layered colors, e.g. painting with blue and mixing in a touch of adjacent color like green to complicate the color and heighten the impact. That effect I've really worked with in Pigment and now many of my picts have layered colored. Am sure this will make my colors in future paintings on physical paper pop even more than before!

SHADING: I never realized it before seeing my Pigment paintings next to paintings from talented Pigment users that my paintings didn't have much shading. So I studied many other artists' paintings and then tried to emulate their shading techniques, and all I can say is ... this has been the biggest game changer in my development as an artist on Pigment, and I'm sure on physical paper! Wow!

SPECIAL EFFECTS: I'm a traditional watercolor artist, meaning I don't want hard edges, I want soft transitions with realistic colors, and I want to let my edges merge in with one another. However, on Pigment we are coloring outlines, which means there will be hard edges, something that doesn't appeal to my senses. Also many artists cutesify their paintings with the special effect brushes--airbrush in halos, laser in lightning, paint in wood tones and then outline petals with another color (again the hard edges), add dots, and pencil markings, bubbles, brilliant clouds .... and so I adapted to this often non-realistic style but a style that is used for marketing, style posters and modern stylized art. I like it and have frequently use it now--it's a style immensely popular with the Pigment community because of the many special effect brushes which are loads of fun to use--but I rather doubt these special effects will carry over in my future watercolors on paper. I'm still a traditionalist at heart, but the learning has been wonderfully developmental as can be seen by my most recent Pigment paintings below:

My most recent and best painting to date, inspired by a one-color painting challenge (my color: copper in the metals palette)

 

Oh the fun I'm having on Pigment!

(not sponsored information, just a reaction to the encouraging community of artists!)