Jenny Lake

Study of Mountain Reflection in Water

Jenny Lake is in the Teton National Park, WY. I chose this scene to study reflections in water because the original photograph contained high contrasts in the values across the water and because it is one of my favorite places. Reflections in dark water are a particular sort of challenge in Inkscape, so I have additional hints about painting high-contrast reflections to add to those that I outlined in the post entitled Painting water using Inkscape 0.47.

Two values of blue, two values of brown, two values of gray, and black were used as very thin brush strokes to compose the water. The browns and grays are all vertical strokes with vertical motion blurs while the blues and black are all horizontal strokes with horizontal motion blurs. The horizontal strokes also have the torn-edge effect while the vertical strokes have the ripple effect. I placed the dark strokes on the bottom and worked toward the light. The edges of each major color of the horizontal strokes would overlap if they were not interwoven -- that is, only the blurred edges overlap where the colors blend because of the transparency of the blurs. The real key is to break the vertical strokes with the horizontal strokes so the eye sees the reflection but it appears to be reflected on top of the rippling surface of the water.

In this study, I have not worked on the mountains (yet); they are tracings from the photo. I hope to work on the mountains at a later date, but for the time being, I have purposefully placed them "out of focus" as they are of less interest to me than the water in this study.

The photograph upon which this painting is based may be seen at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacdupree/176301129/. The Creative Commons License is:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacdupree/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Experiments with painting rocks

I left the rocks and cliffs on the mountain painting incomplete. I set down their placement to my satisfaction, but I do not like the contrasts within the rock itself -- that is, the cracked lava filter produced too much sparkle. To the right, I have outlined one technique in its various steps that I plan to try on the painting to achieve several benefits. The benefits that I seek include the ability to draw rocks over larger areas and then to trim them to the actual shapes that I see without having the filter effect change. You will find, as you experiment with Inkscape filters, that moving and resizing an object to which you applied a filter changes the filter's effect. Another benefit that I seek is to use a filter, but to change the contrast of the effect without altering the effect itself. In this case, I wish to lessen the sparkle and but keep the the effects of ridges achieved by using the filter in the first place. Finally, I wish to apply blurs and or gradients to objects which contain filter effects without changing the shape of the effect -- I want to affect only the filter effect's contrast with its surrounding objects. I have complained about ghosting when blurs are applied to filtered objects in another post on this blog (river with newly fallen snow), so I really am using this feature enhancement on one painting to solve a general problem that I have run across in other paintings. Finally, I have used the technique described here before with success with other filters (watercolor-style painting of river), so I wanted to see whether it would work as well on the cracked lava filter. It looks promising. Click on the illustration to see a larger version.

Mountain painting using Inkscape

Some of the quirks in this work in progress are outlined in the composite of four images below. Each of the four images is on a separate, Inkscape 0.47 layer, and they are listed in the following order: the lowest layer is first in the series and the highest layer is last.

The rocks are only partially drawn in the composite on purpose so that you may see that I drew the shadows first, and then in a new, higher layer, I drew the rocks on top of some of the shadows. I have also drawn one set of rocks on the mountain's main vertical ridge in the composite but I have not applied the filter to it so that this stage of drawing is illustrated. Click on the composite of the four images to see more details, including a few instructions related to some of the brushes and filters used in the painting.

The original photo from which I drew inspiration for this painting may be found at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/christianabe/2267147039/in/set-72157601230921726/ and its parent site and license at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/christianabe/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Study of hills and water inlet

The new version above is improved over the original below. This might be close to finished.

The foreground and background still needs work in this study based on a photographic of Akaroa harbour by mollivan_jon on flickr. I have used Inkscape filters new to version 0.47 to paint the light and reflections to my satisfaction.

Akaroa on Wikipedia

If you refer to the original, you will see that I took gross liberties as far as composition of the paitning is concerned, but my intention was to focus on the shapes and the light and shadows on the hills as well as experiment with reflections on the water.

Watercolor-style painting of a river gorge

Inkscape and the Gimp were both used to achieve this watercolor-style painting of a river gorge.

A river in the mountains of the West

This painting is an attempt to simulate a watercolor style using Inkscape.

The effects are achieved using many small and blended gradients.

Mountain Gorge

The water is still cold in the streams fed with snow-melt, like the one pictured below. The snow is just now diminishing above tree-line in the part of the West where this photo was taken.

Inkscape was used to highlight aspects of tracings of the photo.

The detailed shot above flows through the gorge pictured in the digital painting below (modeled on one of my photos).

The following inset shows the relative scale of the detail -- this mountain gorge is huge.