Sunday's Al Fresco Art Club's Artrage Challenge -- Paint A Cézanne Landscape

Farmhouses near Bellevue, Paul Cézanne

When the Art Club meets today, I’ll be attempting to paint a Cézanne landscape. I’ll be using the iPad version of Artrage. I’ve decided to use the roller brush because it can cover a lot of territory fast. The other brushes are limited to a size of 100% in the iPad version, which makes them tedious to work with on a canvas larger than 1500x1000. The desktop version doesn’t have the limitation of restricted brush sizes.

Here’s the masterpiece I’m working with, one of Cézanne’s lovely sunny landscapes, Farmhouses near Bellevue.

Later…

I spent an hour copying this picture. When I saved the image, Artrage crashed and my masterpiece disappeared forever. Witnesses told me afterwards that my copy was pretty good. Since the accident, I’m a little wary of using the iOS version of Artrage for critical work, but I’m not going to abandon it yet. Lots of programs crash, including Photoshop and Procreated. Artrage offers so many desirable features that I will stick with it, but in the future, I will save often, and export to the Cloud frequently.

In the meantime, here’s a random Artrage doodle done on the iPad. This is a 1536x1536 image.

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Sunday Art Club Artrage Challenge: Paint like a Master

This week the Al Fresco Art Club challenge was to learn by trying to paint a masterpiece…that is, try to copy a masterpiece. We got to choose our favorite painting program. We could pick any masterpiece we wanted, and we had to work in one layer with no undo. I chose to copy a Cézanne still life using Artrage. I kept it simple by leaving out some details, including a wine glass, background details, and anything else that wouldn’t fit into my one-hour window. I used a two-color palette: bluish and orange-ish, pretty much the same as Cézanne’s color palette.

I chose a still life because I thought it would be something I could complete in one hour. In that amount of time I managed to get the basic shapes and a rudimentary foreground and background. I learned at least one lesson: Still life’s are harder than they look.

Here’s my interpretation of a Cézanne still life. My reference names this painting simply “Still Life.”

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Al Fresco Art Club Day - Self-portrait using Artrage

This week the al fresco art club decided to have an Artrage challenge: paint a self-portrait on one layer without using undo. The idea is to learn to paint in a painterly way so that the final result will have the human-made charm of a traditional media painting instead of boring digital perfection.

I use my iPad’s version of Artrage. It has a all of the features I need to learn how to do “oil painting”. One thing I do like about the one-layer technique is that it helps develop confidence — my precious painting isn’t really precious. If you make a hideous error, you just paint over it without thinking twice and, hopefully, the second effort is better than the first. More likely, the 10th effort is better than the 9th.

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