Combine Kid Pix and Painter to create a richly textured image.
Janet Ashford
Grown-ups may sneer at Broderbund's Kid Pix, a paint program for children, as a serious artistic tool, but it contains a rich collection of patterned fills and whimsical stamp shapes. Illustrator Susan LeVan, of LeVan/Barbee studio in Boston, likes to start an illustration in this unlikely program because she finds that the shapes and fills add serendipitous quirks to the final product. For "Three Brothers," she made a rough sketch in Kid Pix 2 and then painted over it in Fractal Design Painter 3.1, adding layers of texture and color to make the finished piece as richly textured as the mixed-media collages she created before beginning to use a computer.
1. Starting with stamps. LeVan started her "Three Brothers" illustration by sketching the center figure in Kid Pix. She drew in the rudimentary lines of the head and torso and used a variety of patterns -- tweeds, plaids, checkerboards -- to fill in the closed spaces. To create the foundation of the textures, she added more strokes of color and clusters of small images, using a variety of stamps: purple frogs, red flowers, and gray stars. LeVan finds that such stamps, some of which remain visible in the final image, add a delightful randomness.
2. Refining the texture. LeVan reopened the brother image in Painter 3.1 and painted it with a variety of brushes and textures. Using a pressure-sensitive stylus, she enhanced the natural-media look of the image. For example, to add texture to the cheek, LeVan painted in blue with the Square Chalk brush and a paper texture named Diagonal 1 from the More Paper Texture library. By varying pressure on the stylus, she was able to change the thickness of the parallel lines. The other brothers in the image are modified copies of the first one LeVan made.
3. Creating translucent strokes. The hat on the right brother's head in the final image was drawn with lines that look like translucent water stains. LeVan drew black lines over the chair with the Simple Water watercolor brush. To make the lines translucent, she set the Wet Fringe slider in the Advanced Controls palette to 90%. This created the translucent black lines shown in the first example (a). She then reversed the image (Effects: Tonal Control: Negative). Because the water strokes are still "wet," they appear as dark lines. With the image reversed, she dried the water brush strokes (Canvas: Dry) (b). Finally, she reversed the image again to make the strokes milky white (c).
Janet Ashford is the coauthor, with John Odam, of Start with a Scan: A Guide to Transforming Scanned Photos, Drawings and Objects into High-Quality Art (forthcoming from Peachpit Press).
