
This is a picture I took half a year ago in Verona, Italy. It’s a picture of your typical buildings all across Europe. All the houses are squished together and flourished in fun bright, and often, complementary colors. I chose this picture originally just thinking “Italy, home of the art.” It would be a gorgeous building to recreate on the computer. Turns out it was, but it took so much detail and time to draw in every little balcony railing. I mostly used the square brushes, or at least tried to. It was so small it was sometimes hard to tell if it was circular or not. First thing I did was crop the picture because I wanted the focus to be more on the building and not the pavement. What was most challenging when filling in the color was the roof tops and the blue sky, because neither were one color. So after I played around with the mode and opacity for a while, I finally decided to, for example with the roofs, I first chose one color to fill in the roof top, then I chose a more dominant color, set the opacity to 98 and the mode to dissolve, and then refilled over the original color, giving you a multicolored roof top. I really wanted to capture the essence of the housing style in Europe. There is a very different feel when walking down a street surrounded by a block of apartment buildings and walking down a street in Europe next to a tiny little cafĂ© and stone archway’s. I wanted my observer to feel a warm sense of welcome into the picture; to want to be a part of the colorful people enjoying the blue sky.
