Happy Holidays from the PixlBlog!

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I miss the days of mailing holiday cards. For more than 25 years, I created and printed (later, I had it printed) a card made with digital painting tools. It seems that the custom is being quickly obsoleted by email cards, which have a definite "green" factor. A tradeoff is that you can send your greetings to a potentially much larger circle of friends and acquaintances.

The above image is my artwork for this year's greetings. It is based on a photograph I shot in Chicago (on Michigan Ave.) 3 years ago while we visited between Christmas and New Year. I've been working towards creating a greater distance between the source photo and the painted art. For example, I added all of the pedestrians in this painting, which were non-existent in the original.

I wish you all a Happy New Year and continued creativity!

Adobe Update Improves Photoshop CS5 Painting Performance

Good News for Photoshop CS5 users...Adobe has issued an update (12.0.2-Mac) (12.0.3-Win) that significantly improves painting performance, among other things. From Adobe's Photoshop CS5 Update Page:

The most significant fixes in the Photoshop update include the following: 

• A number of potential security vulnerabilities have been addressed 
• Top type and font crashers found in the field have been addressed 
• A number of performance issues have been addressed 
• Crash opening 3D layers has been addressed 
• Color Engine crash has been resolved 
• Intermittent file format issues addressed 
• Shift scrolling bug fixed 
• Sharpen crasher fixed 
• Marching ants not seen at certain zoom levels fixed 
• Metadata focus distance issue addressed 
• File info bug addressed for Orphea Studio jpg files 
• TWAIN crashers fixed 
• Brush cursor bug fixed 
• Histogram progress bar issue fixed 
• Droplet issues addressed

The update is available for Mac and Windows: Mac|Win

Go grab it and start painting!

John's Watercolors User: Kenneth Broström

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Swedish artist Kenneth Broström writes, "Thanks for your brushes! I'm still trying to learn. This is a portrait of my daughter. I used a photo for the sketch only the rest is made in Photoshop and Painter. Thanks again from Sweden!" I think Kenneth is figuring out the brushes very well!

You can see more of Kenneth's work at his website. (I've utilized Google's Translate in the link so that text portions are converted to English.)

John's Watercolors are $35. You can purchase these brushes by clicking the PayPal "Buy Now" button below. If you don't have a PayPal account, an option to pay via credit card is offered as well.

If you have an example of art created with John's Watercolors, send me a JPEG—your work may get featured here!

If you've been frustrated trying to master digital watercolors, John's Watercolors for Painter are the answer!