sigh

[egypturnash]

Playing with Painter for that self-portrait with ghostly serpent. It's a versatile and fun program, but sometimes it frustrates me: I wish there was a well of 'eraser' paint I could dip into as easily as I can choose a color. Keep my current brush, but instead of laying down color, it lays down nothingness, letting the underlying layers shine through. Or whatever the background color is if you're on the special 'Canvas' layer. My digital method relies very much on layers, and Painter only sort of does them. Supposedly the recently-released 8 handles them better.

[ Thought for methodology for this picture:

1. rough in with Graphic Paintbrush Soft on several layers
   
2. do basic detailing - especially shading under hard edges, etc
   
3. compress character layers into one, since so many of Painter's tools just don't play well with layers (nasty fringing issues since they fade out to white, not to opacity-0)
   
4. finesse
   

the troublesome part is that I want the serpent to be transparent; since it's winding around me, this means it has to be on several layers. Maybe if I just fine-paint it on one layer, then use whatever equivalent there is to PS's cut to new layer to get pixel-sharp transitions? Also, where it's seen overlapping itself, can you see the back coil through the front coil? Probably not; it feels like it should be opaque with respect to itself. ]