Painting a Candlelight Composition
Still Life Digital Painting tutorial with Adobe Photoshop

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In this tutorial, we are going to mainly focus on a still life painting.  I sometimes think that still life paintings just dull and mechanical exercise things. But surely we must make practice still life paintings.  If you take a look at master works, both classic and modern, you will notice that many of their most important works are still life paintings. Drawing still life paintings an excellent exercise for the beginner students and also intermediate and advanced students.  Here is this is the final painting that I draw for this tutorial. You can create your own compositions, lighting effects, and arrangements of color. It took me around 5 hours I think.   In brief: I paint this still life painting to practice shading and color blending also and I think I really like the second final result

* Program: Adobe Photoshop CS3
* Wacom Intuos2 6×8 Graphics Tablet
* Difficulty: Intermediate
* Completion Time: 1-5 hours
Note: I’m using Adobe Photoshop. But if you wish…you can use the other tools like..Corel Draw etc.

Then  I was not entirely  happy with the composition so  I  decided to change composition and draw  an old broken blank picture frame, I think in this way it looks more nice as we think this would be look like an old still life composition on a wall.  I’m trying to get better with composition and painting in a better way.

Also I would like to tell you, I regard myself as an average painter and don’t pretend to know everything or even much about brushes, I keep it simple…. Painting still life is a great way to practice shading and color blending. You can have a candlelight photograph if you want…working from a photo is fine, you will get truer shades and reflections from real life. And some  Photo references are perfect but nothing beats the real thing.  If you are trying to get help for your personal painting you may have more luck at critique section. So those photos will be only a source of inspiration for your magnificent work.  You are not going to paint same of those photos. They are only for to get inspired.

Now about my Canvas size, as you now a bigger canvas size is better in digital Remember, to print a4 you will need approx. 2500px 3500px canvas size.

For web publishing

it usually base the format sizing on standard paper or illustration sizes are 5×7, 9×12, 11×14, 11×17 inches. And resolution set  to 72. So if my final size is 9×12 at 72 dpi resolution, I will have to work 2 or 3 times bigger.

So it would be

600×739

72 dpi

For print

This will required a higher resolution.

it usually base the format sizing on standard paper or illustration sizes are 5×7, 9×12, 11×14, 11×17 inches. And resolution set to 200 or 300 (200 to 300 dpi is best for printing resolution)

3100×3818

300 dpi

After I finished this tutorial, I want to print  my illustration on A4 paper size. if you ask; “How do I print my final illustration On A4 Size? I study this tutorial and I draw a very nice still life painting and now I want to see my illustration on  a A4 page. What must I do?”  Successful printing depends on the size of the file you are trying to print. The size of the file is determined by the resolution you used when you took the picture. We will draw this  illustration more bigger file size and then we must arrange  it for A4 paper size.  Here this will me my final print size arrangements.  3100×3537

A4 is a document format, as a screen image that’s going to depend on the image resolution, for example an A4 document resized to:

72 dpi (web) = 595 X 842 pixels

300 dpi (print) = 2480 X 3508 pixels (This is “A4″ as I know it, i.e. “210mm X 297mm @ 300 dpi”)

600 dpi (print) = 4960 X 7016 pixels

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2012 at 20:21 and is filed under Adobe Photoshop, Digital Painting, Drawing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.