This painting was done last January at the same time my husband had a heart attack. He obviously survived it and had a stent done. I called this piece “You Light Up My Life,” because I really wanted to tell him that at the time. It was a really scary experience as ‘life experiences’ go. After 37 years you get used to having someone around. (I met him when I was 16 and married him at 19 years old while I was in my second year of Nurses training.)

It’s pretty difficult to see a lot of the differences between these two paintings at this size. It was a matter of tidying up the edges for the most part. I have developed some very useful blenders and some of them I use to move the paint around. Some are derived from resaturation of a Blender variant. I’ve been using one lately that I ‘found’ again that I originally obtained from the Painter 9.5 WOW book. It’s called “Oily Blender,’ but I may have changed its properties and not the name. I don’t know what kind of brush it was in the first place because it is a “Captured” Brush. I haven’t done much in the area of creating brushes from Dabs. I tend to stick to wanting to make a fairy controlled mark and have found the seemingly infinite variables of the few brushes I usually use more than enough to try and control. This is just another way of saying  I only know how to paint a certain way, and although I know how to do all kinds of neat things with the brushes I still have a long way to go before I can put it to any use in a painting.

Prior to using Corel Painter I have painted with traditional watercolours and acrylics in my teens a little bit. I have used pastels a little more and have been sketching and doodling most of my life. I also played around with Corel Draw 7 and Corel PhotoPaint and became interested in trying to paint with the mouse before I got my Wacom tablet and Painter 9.5. I have the first painting I did this way still. It was a study of a Max Hayslette painting. Maybe I should post that one and then you could really see how my technique has improved! I’m doing this because I want to show you that people who don’t have any training in art or in computers can find working with Corel Painter a lot of fun and very satisfying. Sometimes I think I don’t find ‘painting’ this way odd because I haven’t painted any other way very much. I have been doing it since February 2005, and have spent many, many hours at it. At the risk of sounding completely flaky…I sometimes feel that I have painted the other way in a previous life and that‘s why it seems so familiar and feels so right. I expect my Intuos Pen to drip when I pick it up from the holder sometimes, when I’m really involved in a painting. That’s a weird thing to admit, and it’s probably my overactive imagination creating a scene or déjà vu? Some may laugh and look condescendingly at my efforts and think I’m delusional to call this art and myself an artist, but that’s a discussion for another day.

I cropped a similar section from each version of the painting to try and illustrate the differences more clearly. The first person to spot 25 differences wins a prize!! Lol! There must be a thousand at least. I repainted each pixel! I wonder how many pixels there really are and how many times each one was changed. I don’t waste watercolour paper, but my Wacom tablet is literally wearing out in the centre. I’ve tried moving spots, but always end up back in the middle. I have so many palettes and things open that I can hardly see my painting sometimes. Think it is time to stop… I’m rambling too much!