Multicultural Mosaic of People

(Click to enlarge)

(Detail - click to enlarge)

I've been working on a few projects over the past few weeks, including one that involves showing a multicultural mosaic of people seen from the back. These are details from that painting, still a work in progress. The tools I'm using are Corel Painter 11 and the Wacom Cintiq 21UX.

Even though I've written about this before on this blog, I have to say it again: I just love the way Painter lets you leave evidence of the "artist's hand." This is (ahem) hands-down one of my favourite things about Painter: the way you can see each stroke, and the way strokes interact in natural-looking ways without losing their individual qualities. You can also adjust each stroke so it has very specific properties before laying it down. In practice, this provides a lot of opportunities to DRAW within paintings... to distribute pigment using lines and also to create crumbly textures. In this image, there's a lot of brushwork using the Oils Smeary Round brush as well as some Sponge to get nice textured splotches... and I used dark blue to give the whole thing a bit of a woodcut feel.

I enjoy drawing or painting for articles/books that promote multiculturalism and tackle issues of identity. Here are some more drawings along these lines, done for the LRC (Literary Review of Canada).