Digital Paintings

Graphic design and web design are competitive fields. A website that clearly communicates your services, experience, and expertise is an essential tool every designer needs to promote their business. The site in and of itself needs to be a portfolio piece that prospective clients can look at and be impressed by.

I spent a lot of time crafting the website for Jeff Troupe Designs. I wanted it to be clean and professional with little clutter. but it was important to show what I believe makes our company stand out from the crowd. Design ability, color knowledge, typography, user interface aptitude are attributes that most professional level graphic designers share. But few can create their own quality content and fewer still have professional illustration experience. These are the differences I wanted to be sure to highlight on our website. I did that in a few ways, one of which was creating digital paintings of our two team members.

Digital paintings are not digitized photographs, but rather are painstakingly created by hand using brush tools in Photoshop. You create paintings such as this much in the same manner as you would a traditional oil painting. I begin with a pencil sketch on paper and then scan the sketch on my flatbed scanner. Now I am able to take the scan of my sketch into Photoshop. A mouse is not the proper tool to create a quality digital painting. You need a pen and tablet which is similar to a mouse and mouse pad except the pen looks like a typical pen. You can "draw" right on the tablet and the results are seen on your monitor. Wacom makes a great tablet. I use the basic Intuos 2. The pen is even pressure sensitive and the brush tools in Photoshop do a decent job of mimicking oil paint brushes, water color or pastel. I enjoy making most of my digital paintings look like chalk pastel which is achieved using the "sponge" brushes.

Below are high resolution versions of the digital paintings that are featured on my website.