patrickparker 29 Jan 2008One Comment 450 views Print Email

  Art, surf

Computers today can be used for thousands of different things. You can order groceries, make a doctor’s appointment, write a novel, or even find the love of your life. Surfers mainly use computers to check surf cams, weather maps, and scout out travel destinations. If you are a surf artist who is only using traditional methods to do their craft, I want to invite you to the wonderful world that the computer has to offer.

Programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator are the leading design tools used to make fantastic art on your computer. Instead of holding a paintbrush, you hold a mouse. Photoshop is great for playing around and enhancing photos that you have taken, as well as making amazing three dimensional looking art, but this article will focus on Illustrator. The reason for this is the ease of use of certain drawing tools, but more importantly, having your work saved in vector format (which allows you to scale your art up to large sizes without losing quality).

Adobe Illustrator can be purchased for around $600, not bad for a tool that you can earn thousands of dollars with over time. Once you own the program, you must learn how to use the basic tools. There are many places online that will teach you the main functions, or you can buy a how-to book from any bookstore. Dedicating a few days to learning the ins and outs of the program will save you time down the road, cutting out the time it takes to fumble over different filters and effects. After you feel comfortable playing around with the tools and testing your knowledge with tutorials, jump into making your first real surf scene.

Your first couple designs shouldn’t be too challenging. Trying to design a very detailed and realistic version of Pipeline or Jeffrey’s Bay is biting off more than you might be able to chew. Instead, try designing a sunset with a small island in the background, a wave in the middle ground, and a beach and palm tree (silhouetted) in the foreground. A subject with less detail will help you gain practical knowledge that you can later translate into successful computer aided art.

My favorite tool to use is the pen tool because it gives you 100% control of what shape you want to make, and because it makes a crisp, clean line. You will find that using the paintbrush tool is nothing like the real thing, mainly because a mouse isn’t a paintbrush (duh!). Strokes, filters, and effects can be applied to the shapes you make to give the appearance of a painting.

After you have made your sunset sky, try applying a gradient. Most skies have the lightest colors near the horizon fading to deeper and richer colors as the altitude gains. Try a light yellow or orange near the horizon and a mid-toned orange at the top. To make the water, do the same thing but just opposite direction (lighter color near the horizon). The water color should be somewhat similar to the sky colors because of reflection. Use atmospheric perspective to give the small island in the background the correct color to make it visually far away.

Moving on to the wave, choose a color you want the water to be as your highlight (refer to my previous article “Painting Backlit Waves” to learn more about this). After you have shaped your wave, apply another gradient. Use just a small portion of the highlight color near the top of the wave and fade it to a darker water color towards the base. The offshore wind and whitewash should be light washed out blue and purple colors. What’s great about using a computer is that if you mess up, just push delete or undo (I wish there was an undo button when I paint in watercolors). You can play around with color and size and gradients all you want until you get it right.

Draw the palm tree and foreground island and put them in silhouette, this will aid in the atmospheric perspective and give more emphasize on the wave and sunset. Try applying different filters, effects, and strokes to all of your shapes to figure out what will work best. I personally like to apply brush options to my strokes, use the gradient mesh tool on my shapes, as well as different blur and blending modes. To make reflection in the water, try using the Scribble option.

Make sure to save your work periodically just in case the computer freezes or craps out (I have lost hours and hours of my time and efforts because I forgot to). After completion, save it as a jpeg so your art is ready to go on your website, myspace, or friendster. Keep the file in vector (.ai) format if you want to get it professionally printed on a large scale. To do this with paintings, you would have to have them professionally scanned or photographed, which can run $100 or more per piece.

Hopefully with a little practice, the computer will be another to tool in your creative arsenal, as well as bring your wildest creations and dreams to life.

Check out www.patrickparkerart.com for more surf art examples or to contact me.