Trained in college as a scenic artist ( design & painting for the theatre) my original mediums of expression were water media; watercolor, gouache, inks, dyes, casein, acrylic, etc. and working in the theatre and then getting into environmental art my projects started working there way up in size, …way up in size. In the spring of 97 however I finally latched on to a killer desktop Macintosh clone with lots of RAM so the world of Painter and PhotoShop opened up to me. Suddenly the filter that used to take 30 to 40 minutes to run suddenly only took a few seconds so since then I’ve been spending my time fooling around with digital art and loving it. What appears below are some of the samples from both worlds although for the bigger stuff you’ll have to take a trip either to the Paradigm Theatrical Spaces & Environments part of the ParadigmProjects.com web site
—J. Jerrald Hayes
The art work depicted below is roughly in an order where the more recent work is at the top of the page and the earlier work from all the way back in 1997 towards the bottom
The Sarah Portrait
One of my early or first attempts at PhotoShop 4.0 and Painter 4.0. this is not a touched up photo.It’s a drawing and painting done with a Wacom Tablet. I’m not really sure how I did it but to the best of my memory now the project was done almost entirely done in Photoshop and for all intents and purposes I never needed to use Painter although I did some of the early lay-in of hair there.
Using a scan of a reduced line drawing (click here to see the line drawing) I did back in ’89 as a starting point I would block in color much like I would do as under-painting in conventional acrylic painting. I would then ADD NOISE and then BLUR or SMART BLUR and then sometimes I’ll go back and SHARPEN EDGES if I feel it’s called for.
I try to separate the project into component groups so I work on the eyes, work on the nose, etc. but because this was an early learning experience with PhotoShop I would keep on FLATTENING Layers so that I wouldn’t confuse myself with drawing management.
The one drawback to my block-in and blur technique is that it makes the subject look younger. At one stage in the drawing it looked as though she was 14 but with some touch ups I think I’ve got the basic image in the “Combined” layer to look like someone in her mid 20’s . On the other hand another friend of mine in her 40’s didn’t seem to think it was a problem and now she wants me to do her portrait,
Greeting Lizzey Brewster
Really a worksheet or thumbnail of a larger painting I plan to do in acrylic sometime this winter. Mocking up the idea in Photoshop allowed me to work out the compositional relationships of the five elements to each other before committing myself to an actual drawing on the full sized panel (probably 3′ wide X 4′ tall)
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Untitled 1
Another planned painting for the summer of 99. I had the original idea maybe four years ago and the pencil sketch sat in my sketch book until I scanned it in and started moving elements around to rework out the composition.
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Untitled 2
Scanned in a graphite drawing I did back in college and just colorized it and ran a few filters on it to give it a painterly look.
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Untitled 3 (Acrylic & Watercolor on Masonite- 30″x 48″ painting)
A scan of a photograph of a painting I did back in 1987 or 88 if I can recall correctly. I gave the painting away as a gift long ago so I can’t check the accuracy of the JPEG image here against the original for color or contrast accuracy. I believe (I know) the original was darker but with a lot more contrast and the grass and trees were green not yellow. As soon as I get the time I plan to touch up the scan in PhotoShop and correct it to better represent the painting as I remember it. It was one of the first painting I did on a masonite panel prepared with a mixture of gesso white glue and pumice which is now my preferred preparation for panels whenever I’m not painting on watercolor paper.
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St. Sebastion Found by St. Irene by LaTour and the copy by Jerrald Hayes — An Exercise from College 1976 SUNY Purchase
While I didn’t understand the reasoning back then in college scene painting class they used to give us a print or piece of a drawing and the following week we HAD to hand in a completed painting or what ever we had that even resembled the assignment. In all the wisdom that I’ve gained since then I now see what they were teaching us was to work with a deadline in mind as we worked. The Print- 8″ x 10″
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More Exercises from College
Another project from the same class that I just mentioned above only this time a different problem. We were given a a line drawing (in this case 6″ x 8″) and asked to finish off (render) the rest off the room. This meant using the perspective of the drawing to determine the perspective you would use to draw the rest of the room. If you click on the line drawing to look at the full size image you can still make out the lines I drew to plot the vanishing points.
The Empire Room Rendered by Jerrald Hayes 1976 SUNY Purchase
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