by Emile Noordeloos

Emile Noordeloos has always been interested in art, especially in oil painting and airbrushing. At one point he even worked successfully for an art agency in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, but as so often life took a different turn and Emile changed his career to become a biologist! (He actually became an assistant anaesthetist later). That was in 1985 - and believe it or not ... it would take 21 years until he made his next painting!

Art Scene International presents the making of Emile Noordeloos first painting after 21 years...and his first endeavour into the digital world.

A new start

I had a knee operation in January 2006 and was in for a few months of recovery.  This recovery period gave me a lot of free time and I started to draw to keep me busy.Inspired by an online gallery of carnivorous plants with beautiful shapes and colours, I did some sketching on paper trying to visualise the idea of a fairy with sundew characteristics and lots of hair forming the tentacles with glasslike dewdrops. Little insects and fairies would fly around attracted by the sweetness of the dewdrops. A few weeks earlier I had grabbed the chance to get the new Photoshop CS2 and a Wacom Intuos digitizer through my work, as part of my job deals with codes, structures and graphics of the hospital's inter- and intra-net.   So after some sketching I decided to give my digital tools a first try... in other words I started this image with little or no experience in digital painting, with no experience in Photoshop or Painter at all.  And strangely it felt great from the start.  
 
Step 1

After I did the sketches I scanned them and opened them in Photoshop. Perfect, that worked! But what next? My preferred toolset, years and years ago, used to be oil paint or airbrush and inks. I still have several Paasche airbrushes, among them the left-handed AB, which makes masking for small areas unnecessary - but like I said before a long time has gone by without using them. But just because I am so used to airbrushing I tried to apply this airbrush workflow while working on the fairy. By the way: I did not plan the whole colour and shadows scheme beforehand. I just looked at it as a new challenge and approached this project more or less as a jigsaw puzzle, which I would put together later on.

 
Step 2 & 3

I started by making flat coloured shapes of the main parts first and used the shape for masking purposes. This reminds me of the time I used to tediously cut frisket film with a swivel knife to make masks for my airbrush paintings out of cardboard. Compared with doing the same thing in Photoshop this is now a piece of cake. Oh, right...at a later stage I "discover" the `preserve transparency` button, which gives an instantly perfect mask of every irregular shape.  Perhaps I should have started with reading the manual! Anyway, after applying a green reddish layer on the main layer I start with the eyes on a new layer. With the airbrush tool I spray the shapes in shades of grey.  Modifying and correcting details is then done by a simple soft edge smudge brush set to an opacity of 50-75%. Now I create 2 more layers were for the irises and for the reflection. Having separate layers turns out to be very useful to be able to correct their position later on. Once everything looks ok I group the layers, copy and merge them, keeping the copied one as a backup. You never know!
 
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Read the whole article in issue No. 73.