Art By Val Erde

Hello! I’m Val Erde, and I live with my husband and a lot of wild birds in rural Wales.

Please scroll down the page to see some artwork, learn a bit about me and my process, and see a demo of how I work.

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Ferryman © Val Erde
Pencil and watercolour.
Click the image to see it in Redbubble.

I’ve been an artist all my life, taking after my mother who was a painter and sculptor. Originally I drew, then in my teens I progressed through felt and fibre tip pens to using watercolour, my preference now as then, being watercolour pencils.

I had – and still have – an unusual way of painting with watercolour. Rather than draw out the main content or delicately lay down washes, I place heavy amounts of colour in various places on semi-shiny card, wet my brush with water, dry it off a bit on a tissue, and then I push the paint (which is wetted a bit by the brush) away from myself and in the direction I want. This makes it form lines, and depending on how wet the brush had been, the areas that are left behind have the effect of a pale or intense graduated wash. In this way I can manipulate drawn lines to make them look like wash, and wash to make it look like drawn lines. I know it sounds counterproductive, but that’s the way I work.

When I draw with graphite pencil, my technique is to very rapidly cover the whole area with very soft-grade graphite (usually 8B or 9B) until no paper shows through, then smudge it with a tissue or my fingers. And then I take some time to pretty much meditate on it until I can see forms, which I pick out with an eraser to show the highlights and more pencil to show the shadows, leaving what’s there to be the midtones. All the while, I also use a finger or bit of tissue (as a tortillon) to push the graphite into areas where I want it and further define the content.

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While it may not look like it, I work in the same way with digital media.

Girl With Hat is a digital painting that I did from scratch, painting it by hand inside the program.

Now before you jump to the usual conclusion that digital art is generated by the computer, let me set you straight: while it is the computer that generates the tools, it is the artist who generates the content.

Think of it this way: a novelist sits down to write a novel using pen and paper. How many writers actually do it that way anyore? More often than not they jot down some ideas and then put on their computer and open a word-processing program such as Word and use that. It is not the program that writes the novel, it is the writer. The content is not being generated by the program, it is coming from the writer. The program is just a tool. The program can make the words appear as though they were in ink, it can erase them, it can usually add illustrations in the form of artwork or photos imported from files on the writer’s computer all of which need to be in digital form to be used by the program. Does it make any difference to the actual quality of the novel’s content that it wasn’t produced by ‘real media’ of pen and paper? No. And, it’s exactly the same with a graphics program. If you use email, you are creating content digitally. If you blog, everytime you type a blog post, you are using digital media: do the words belong to the computer? No, they don’t. Did the computer think of the words? No, it didn’t. And neither my computer nor the graphics program I use generate my artwork!

I use Photoshop Elements to give me tools that help me produce the same effects as smudging with pencil, pushing paint with a paintbrush, making tones lighter with an eraser and making tones darker with more pencil or paint. Instead of a paintbrush or pencil, I use a mouse to guide the tools across the screen and increase and decrease the amount of colour or tonality that I need. The motions that I make with the mouse cause the tool-shaped cursor on the screen to make strokes like a brush, pencil, eraser or tortillon. The amount of skill needed to create art in a graphics program is equivalent to that needed to create art with any other media.

If you had an accident and had to rely on artificial legs or hands, would it make you less of a person? No. And my use of a graphics program makes me no less of an artist than if I were using paint or pencil.

And actually, in much of my artwork I do still use both watercolour and pencil but now I combine them with digital media. For instance, in The Charmer (which, by the way, is my favourite of my own paintings) I drew the figure, from scratch, into the program then added colour, then overlaid a watercolour painting of mine onto it, merged the two and did some more work in the program. In Floral Meditation 2, I drew the figures from scratch into the program and added a photo (that I had first adjusted in the program) over the top, made it look like fabric – which is how I intend a lot of my digital paintings to appear – and merged them. The photos and paintings are first scanned into the program, in other words, they are digitised. Many of my paintings use my watercolours and drawings, many use patterns that I’ve created inside the program, and many use photos. Esmerelda and the Chicken, one of my favourite whimsical digital paintings started with the figures created by me by hand in the program and then to that I added a sky photo of a very stormy sunset over the top, oversaturated the colours of the photo, merged them and picked out the detail I wanted, manually. And still on the subject of whimsy and chickens… Chickaroo is a digital painting done in my usual way but with a photo added in a rather unusual place…

The possibilities when combining different types of media are endless.

I’m so frequently asked about my techniques that when I created Girl With Hat (above), I did it as an animated .gif so that I could show you the different stages and explain a bit about what I’m doing. Unfortunately, the .gif file type can use no more than 256 colours out of the millions of shades and hues that are in a normal digital palette, and so some of the colour graduation is lost, but it will at least give you an idea of my process.

As each .gif file had to be quite short, I’ve split it up into nine parts. I’ve marked the beginning of each with the part number so that you can see where it starts as, of necessity, I had to have them loop (when they finish they automatically start again). If for any reason they won’t work for you, try refreshing your browser. Watch each part and then just scroll down to the next one, and wait for the text to appear to see it from its beginning. They are all very short, but the last one may seem longer as I’ve made it play more slowly. I’ve not animated each brush stroke as that would have made the files impossibly large, instead I’ve animated every few strokes. This is why some parts of the painting may seem a bit jerky in places.

I’ve put left some spaces in between each part so that you are less likely to have visual interference from the one below or above.

DIGITAL PAINTING DEMO OF ‘GIRL WITH HAT’, BY VAL ERDE.

Part 1

In almost all my digital paintings, I start off with a black base. I use a tool called ‘Dodge’ to draw or paint lighter areas. Once I’ve got the basic shape I want, I switch to the ‘smudge’ tool and use it like a tortillon (see above). When I see areas that need lightening or darkening, I use the ‘dodge’ tool for the highlights and the ‘burn’ tool for the shadows. These replicate my use of eraser and pencil. I also use the smudge tool to push around the major tonal areas, for instance it can often be easier (or at least, it is for me) to extend an existing highlighted surface than to create it from scratch with the dodge tool. What you’re seeing in part one, is me ‘pushing’ the image into the form I want and, sometimes, actually pushing the image to different parts of the canvas (the whole area is called the canvas.)

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Part 2

The form tends to suggest itself to me as I work, I rarely know exactly what I’m going to paint before I start. In Part 2, I’m defining the highlights on her arms and one shoulder and creating the highlights and shadows on part of her clothes, so that you can see which is in the foreground and which is in the background. I’m also beginning to bring her skirt into existence.

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Part 3

Here I’m defining the figure further, delineating areas so that they are more recognisable to someone other than myself. I smudge the skirt out further, occasionally changing my mind and taking it into a different direction. I’m also using the dodge tool over and round her head to begin defining the hat, a bit of her hair, and give the space surrounding her some form.

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Part 4

I had a few changes of mind about her skirt, in part four, as you’ll see! This often happens in my work, regardless of whether it’s digital or otherwise. Sometimes my indecisiveness gets so bad that I have to put something away for a few weeks so that I can clear my head and return to it afresh. But with an animation one doesn’t really have that luxury so I just worked through it. When I had what I thought I wanted, I created highlights in the folds of her skirt, to make them look slightly metallic. I’m still only using three tools here: dodge, burn and smudge. They are the ones I use most often and most regularly. I’m also adding more midtones around her. Midtones are the starting point for highlights and shadow, in my work, and all three are necessary for creating the illusion of form – and that’s all art is: illusion.

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Part 5

Here I’m starting to add colour. What colour I add largely depends on the mood I want the painting to have and my own mood at the time. I have a very well defined colour sense, always have had, and it’s important to me that I get them right and particularly that they are balanced. Here I’m using them from a blue through violet range, with a little yellow added for a turquoise and a bit of lime. (If you are seeing the colours differently, don’t worry: all monitors make things appear a little different and some computers do too.

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Part 6

In part six I’m being bolder and am making the highlights really bright as though strong light were creating them – the sort of light that one sees with sunlight or sharp lighting. The shadows are now darker as a contrast. As well as using dodge and burn (on higher settings to increase their intensity of action), I’m using the sponge tool which on one of its settings increases colour saturation and on the other decreases it. Here I’m increasing some of the colour saturation as that gives the illusion of sunshine or – as it’s really a dance-like image – probably ‘disco’! I’m also beginning to define a bit of her hair and am smudging her hat and surround into form.

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Part 7

In this part I’m enhancing the colour and brightness (at least once via the main brightness control) but am primarily defining her hat and hair, plus the decorations that are on her hair. Unfortunately the .gif file type is starting to affect the smoothness of the image in this animation. If you look at the finished painting that I showed before the start of this demo, you’ll see that the grainyness that’s in the animation isn’t actually present in the finished painting: it’s just the way the program is reducing the colours for animation, as I mentioned above.

The red and orange that I’m adding is with the paintbrush tool, as is the other colour. The white you see here is over-dodged colours: this takes the canvas to white. I often use it to give a neon effect or a high metallic shine just before it hits neon.

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Part 8

In part 8, I’m changing my mind a bit about the hair decorations, am using dodge on them a bit (using dodge on red takes it to orange, then yellow then white) and am adding some decoration to her skirt, also with dodge used on them to make them glow.

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Part 9

In the final part, part 9, I’m making the top part of her clothes better match her skirt in flow – like loose clothing that’s swirling about her as she dances (or maybe she’s just twirling to show off her hat) and am adding some decoration to her sleeves to help tone them in with her hair and skirt decorations. I am also enhancing the shape of her clothes and surround more with a little extra light via the dodge and sponge tools and am generally finishing off. Again, unfortunately, the animation had made the graduation of colours deteriorate in this view. Please look at the finished painting to see it how it really looks.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed and found this demo interesting.

If you’d like to see some of my experimental abstracts, please visit my blog, Arty Old Bird.

My artwork is available to buy on Redbubble. Please visit my Redbubble Portfolio.

If you’d like to do an interview with me or a review of my work and/or reproduce one or more of my paintings on your site or blog, have questions or want to get in touch with me for any other reason that relates to my artwork, please contact me first via the contact form and let me have relevant info, and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

Many thanks!