The brook in the woods: vertical lines and curves

My earlier work that explores the design aspect of landscape digital painting, 

also a balance between realistic and abstract representation. 

林间流水话曲直 

The brook in the woods

I did this piece in 2018, painted with Wacom pen (Intuos Small) using Photoshop. The painting is based on a photo I once took in a small park in Toronto ⇩.

The photo I used for reference

The photo is quite dull. But I was attracted by the early Spring scene: the brook, the bridge, the woods, and the winding road. I believe I can make a good painting with these elements.

My first attempt was a very realistic digital painting that I did with ArtRage, using its color pencil tools. ArtRage does a superb job at simulating different art mediums, be it oil painting, water color, or pencils. I enjoyed the process very much during painting. 

I draw one with ArtRage, not too different from the photo.

However, I felt inadequate when looked at the finished work. It's basically just a simplified version of the photo, even though it got the appearance of an art drawing due to the simulated texture of color pencils. 

One advantage of digital painting is that it's quite easy to start over again. That's what I decided to do, and this time with Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop, with it's versatile brush tools and many other features, offers more flexibility. 

I wanted to put more efforts to design this work. For the new version, I paid more attention to the overall composition than the painting details such as brush strokes, texture, or value of colors.

I decided to make the painting more abstract, but not too abstract that it become unrecognizable. To do this, I retained the major visual elements from my reference photo: the brook, bridge, woods, etc. But I played up with two basic shapes: vertical lines and S-shaped curves. 

One of my sketches

I played a little, just to enhance my composition. For example, I added two pairs of Canada geese on the road, and a car with the driver raising her hands. I wanted to create the visual elements that emphasize the curves and vertical lines.

 

Finally I decided to keep the geese and get ride of the car to make the painting simple. Geese are a familiar sight in the Spring, blend well in this painting.

Pair of geese

The Brook in the Woods, the final work: