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From Art Geek:

More Experimental Results

Tuesday, May 12 2009 UTC

Made some more progress with my approach of using SketchUp to create environments for paintings.

The following in-progress sequence shows the basic idea: create a setting (interior and/or exterior) in SketchUp. Place the camera where you want it. Print out the 'scene’ and transfer it using a grid to canvas or panel.

In this case, I could have just used the SketchUp figure I had in the drawing, but I had access to a real model and wanted to try combining 'real’ and 'virtual’ in one painting. The pose the model took didn’t fit well with the original figure position, so I just moved her in order to get a more consistent visual logic in the painting.

Original SketchUp scene. Figure by Reallusion from the 3D Warehouse.

Gridded preliminary drawing.

Interior – Transferred preliminary drawing, with burnt sienna wash.

Figure posed in the SketchUp interior — this is still preliminary; I may carry it through to a more finished painting, with richer and more finished textures and lighting.

Detail of figure, after two sessions with the model at the Hyde Park Art Center

Messing around this way raises the question, Why paint at all? Why not just render it with Kerkythea or another renderer?

The answer is, I still like to have my 'hand’ in the process, and I think one gets a richer, more beautiful physical surface with paint (though some imagery would be better suited to the flat, photo-like surface that comes from pure digital). I do think, though, that work in virtual 3D and physical 2D media reinforce and support each other nicely: I find I think about volumes and lighting in 2D better after working in 3D, and I think about composition and texture better in 3D as a result of painting and drawing a lot.