Digital Pointillism
in Procreate
The Impressionists
I have always been impressed with the Impressionists. I actually started out with Vincent van Gogh. My grandmother painted with oils as a hobby. Van Gogh was her favourite painter to copy. At home her paintings would hang in the stairway. She had many books of Vincent van Gogh. Gradually I learned to appreciate his work. I even did a speech about Van Gogh when I was in Primary School. After my first visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam I discovered more Impressionist like Claude Monet, George Seurat and Paul Gauguin. I liked the raw energy the paintings have. I never painted in those days, because I wanted to be an animator or comics artist. But during summer I would always turn to the Impressionist. Maybe it has something to do about the lightness of their paintings. The luminosity you also find in watercolours.
iPad Impressionism
When I started working in Procreate I started to paint again. First painting backgrounds for my animations. But when I found the new possibilities to create my own brushes, I was hooked. Inspired by the Impressionist I created my own Stayf Procreate Impressionism Brushes. I used them to explore painting in an impressionistic style. The brushes I named after painters like Monet, Seurat, Cézanne, Van Gogh. Through the years I have painted several digital paintings in that style. To paint in a Pointillism style I created a George Seurat brush with dots. This brush is made up of points. You can paint points in one color and then apply another color on top to create the illusion of blended colours.
George Seurat Pointillism
Just now I finished a painting called Zondagmiddag Kinderhuissingel (Sunday afternoon Kinderhuissingel). It was inspired by the painting Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte by George Seurat. He painted it in the summer of 1884. The painting is painted with dots, also called Pointillism. He used pure colors and did not mix them. It took him two years to finish the painting. The viewer will put the different colors together and visually create the blended color. This color theory was manly based on the color theory of Michel Eugène Chevreul, a French chemist. He basically laid the foundation for the CMYK printing process.
Inspiration
When I was walking to my studio in Haarlem, I walked through a park. It was a hot summers day. On the waterfront a lot of people were enjoying the sun and were sunbathing, walking their dog and on the water there were small boats and guys supping. Somehow it reminded me of the George Seurat painting. I took several snapshot with my iPhone and went on my way. When I was in my studio I grabbed my iPad and started making sketches. When I had the final sketch I started painting the scene with the Stayf-Seurat brush. Here is the result.
Do you get inspiration from paintings you have seen? Let me know in the comments.