P#44: Creating a Photoshop Painting from Scratch

Back in the Old Days

Bert Monroy: "Objects on Cloth" is a really old painting. It was published in that first book on Photoshop back in 1989. Actually, I wrote it in '89. It actually came out in '90.

"Objects on Cloth" is one of those paintings that was done from life. There were no photographs. It's just the little blue glass bottle and some blue marbles sitting on a cloth. I set up that little arrangement on a desk next to my table, my workspace. I lit it and I looked at it, and I painted from life. That was a little different. (click the image for a larger version)

It's extremely low res. It was only 72 dpi and it was 8x10. It's a 1.2 megabyte file so it's really tiny. At the time, this was cool. It was much cleaner and smoother than the stuff I was getting with pixel painting before that. It started to look more like a real painting except for the fact that there was some pixelization. You can actually see the pixels because of the fact that it was done at 72 dpi.

Why did I work at 72 dpi? Because that 1.2 megabyte file was a lot for the machine to handle so throwing things in there, zooming in, and so on took time. It was a lot of looking at that little time bar going across because things were slower. Machines weren't as fast as they are now.

I'm seeing the time bar now, but I'm working on files that are 480 pixels to an inch and they're massive. In fact, my current painting is 11.8 gigabytes in size. That's in its current state. At some point I'm going to have to switch to 16 bit which means it's going to quadruple in size.

"Objects on Cloth" is just looking at the way light works, reflections and so on. I was just painting from life.

In Closing

In "Objects on Cloth" Bert Monroy demonstrates the wonderful potential of Photoshop painting.