Ishi

Yes, the soft brush with varying opacity is a great tool. I think its potential is underrated. I like how 3Dish you made the shadows and highlights with the simple step. This is a forerunner to digital painting in Paint.NET. What the technique was able to achieve on your daughter's picture makes me think of an impressionist painting.

@Beta0 Yes, like the "brochure" link you just posted. That's what I am most likely to do if I actually got to design it because its very simple and I have done that before in MS Publisher. However I had the feeling, that they might have somebody else design it. I didn't feel good about myself because those guys in the printshop seem to be doing a more polished product with Photoshop.

@Beta0 I have made some birthday cards before, shown on my gallery but I suppose my collage and bright-colors design is too cheesy now to begin with. I wanted something new as if it were done by another artist yet professionally competent. So I went to a print shop today and inquired, pretending to be interested by their work but actually picked up a few ideas and about what we could expect with the price range. I think I should settle with 8.5x11 as I only need to design two pages for the front and back which you could then fold into threes. A bunch of scented, design embossed, peach colored paper should do the trick even more. Then they should probably find some people with fine dexterous hands to do the ribbon cutting to wrap the cards as if they were presents. But I saw the guys in there working with Photoshop. They had these layouts, well fitted and very clean looking fonts. I did not feel good about myself. Some very useful Info there @Maximilian. I did not even know about the Flourish plugin. I will try it now.

Thanks for the advice Beta0. I did not know there was a setting in MS Publisher that converts the printing method to CMYK which most if not all the print shops in our town use. Some useful links by the way. Most if not all of them do not use Publisher so if I intend to have something printed I'd just bring a 300 dpi PNG because its possible to make Publisher export your finished work into a PNG or even a PDF that I once did on a document that was printed on one of those shops. I guess I could sort out the paper size later. Perhaps a design and layout suggestion would be great for now. Thanks.

I have been to a printshop and will check another. I pretended to be inquiring things but I'm actually trying to get an idea. I was hoping that someone had something much better in mind and I don't want to start from pre-made templates. Also, these guys use Photoshop so they are of another graphics religion. I was thinking, I either do it all on PDN or its a PDN+MS Publisher combo as I have gained some skill with that underrated program as well and export it to a 300 dpi PNG for maximum quality.

Hello there, so my mate asked me to design a wedding invitation card for him so I kept asking him about the paper size to which he replied last night that its up to me. I want to create a unique wedding invitation card and I want it to be purely PDN and he told me that they're on a peach color motif. I want every single element to be PDN and if I were to use some decorative images, I would want to pull them from the images I took myself. Well I have to download a third party font suited for the design though. So can anyone suggest something very neat and elegant and also the ideal paper size? I also want to have filigrees in it entirely PDN. If I had time, I want it rather a bit ambitious because this guy's a real close friend to me. Thanks.

I do experiment with different blendning modes, sometimes one blending mode on top of the other. I like adjusting the layers to various opacities so the overall effect they have becomes more subtle and not too imposing (for example, some blending modes can make the image too saturated). For the work that I have done, I think Multiply and Overlay with various opacities have done a great deal for me. I'm also quite dependent on the Curves/Curves+ and Levels tools to get the tone, shadows, midtones and highlights adjusted till my eye like them.

Are you copying images from a web browser into Paint.NET? This "not enough memory" error occurred to me one evening when I already have PDN v4.0.13. Some others have seen this problem too. A solution was proposed that if copying images from a web browser such as those from Google Images, click on the "View Image" first, so the full image gets loaded unto a page before you right click-copy it to Paint.NET and this way, you might just not have the "not enough memory" error. Look at the latest posts of this recent thread about the same issue. And welcome to the forums!

For something like your example, you could use Clouds of 2 shades of light orange as your primary and secondary colors with around ~70 Scale and around ~0.75 Roughness. And now for the frost. Make your primary color white and your secondary color transparent (just make the transparency value 0). Create a 2nd layer and on that layer, try to render Clouds once more. Again with low Scale and considerably high Roughness settings. Optional: Apply a blur of the 2nd layer or lower its layer opacity where you made the frost. Flatten the layers.

Art Nouveau seems like a very elegant theme thanks to the link by Pixey, showing posters of what I assume to be illustrations of women on the late 1800s. They are somewhat comparable to Mary Cassatt flat-color paintings, inspired by Japanese art that I read about in my opinion. I would love if I can make one but too much work for me to achieve what I had in mind, especially that I imagined if I could model it from someone rather special that I also wish would celebrate Valentines Day with me. I'm not motivated at the moment to try it or even start a canvass just to see how it could play out.

Looks like they can be visualizations for a music player and they are psychedelic too. The middle one reminds me of Christmas lanterns. How were you able to come up with the symmetry of these patterns?

I think a Clouds+ or Advanced Cloud plugin will be written in the near future, hopefully. However the example above is possible with someone who has a very advanced use and skill of the paintbrush and the Smudge tool maybe.

I should say that I "cracked" the shape so its a nut joke lol Yes, I too am more contented with the color of this one than of my first submission. But I'm still not that greatly impressed because to me, it also resembles a distorted coffee bean, a nutmeg or a cacao pod.

New version, new entry.

This is my succeeding attempt with the wallnut which is basically one of the 3 wallnuts on the first image that I tried to enhance though I must say, its now starting to resemble our local cacao pod.

Thanks Pixey. I guess my first attempt on that gave me a sense of accomplishment today at least. Lost the steady Internet connection here at home so I haven't been participating as much as I should be doing artistically. I had long periods of idleness before. Some PDN plans never made it to the PDN canvass. Wallnuts don't grow in our place. I was lucky enough to get me some from a box of gifts sent to my grandma, maybe 11-13 years ago. I do have preference for peanuts (locally available), cashews and almonds whenever I feel cutting the calorie drive from potato chips and other fried chips which I would hopefully resist for most of the week. The Object of the Fortnight challenge is a new one and a good test of versatility for us too. But I feel there's more fun if backgrounds are allowed so that a composition of items could be made but leave that for another artwork. Cheers.

Thank you Maximilian. Few minutes after I started, I was starting to feel it may not work but pulled through it with rather more experimentation of how to texturize and distort the wallnut than with technique which I unfortunately lack. I do have a self-invented/discovered technique for making shadows though. The plugins, Cloud, Shape3D, Levels, Vibrance, Liquify, Smudge, Sharpen and Grain,did it for me. Luckily, "still life" is an art form I used to sketch way back in highschool.

My first PDN entry for 2017 as a response to the new type of image competition

My first all 100% PDN artwork for a while. First PDN forum entry of mine this year. I'm more of a peanuts and cashews guy, have not touched a wallnut in several years since that doesn't grow here. Here's my experimental but I think it was OK for a first attempt.

Its an anomaly that I've seen before but I would not associate that with Paint.NET. Malware could be something to blame or a faulty Registry key. It can also happen to other programs and make their icons be uniform on all other icons on the Desktop. This video shows a fix for that. Or you can also use System Restore to a date prior to the PDN auto-update and just manually download and install a standalone installer of PDN from the official PDN site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocxhADzHffY

Depend on what you want to achieve. I recommend trying the Curves or the Curves+ adjustment tools. And also Levels and Vibrance among my favorites because they are not so hard to use. They are for adjusting the colors, lightings, shadows, midtones, and highlights which might just help with poor picture quality from some phone cameras. Also the Black and White and Sepia.

Pixey, I think you're the PDN user that some of us here wish they can be. A new thing comes up, you make something out of that and make it your own. The latest one is something of awe as usual. It can be hung as a wall decor on a dining room and I imagine having a glass table on a nice front porch and that beautiful piece sits elegantly on the top of the table covered with glass as I sip my morning and afternoon tea. Amazing!

If you can give a sample image, maybe some of us can give it a shot. For starters, you can create a new layer and select this new layer, paint gray over the skin of your subject and see which layer blending mode and opacity works best for a cyborg skin. You can do they same by painting some weird color into the eyes.

New designs for the logo. The client wants something else, preferably something with a logo object I suppose. I'm short of ideas.

Its beside a city highway that has palm planted next to it. LOL I appreciate your interesting suggestions and observations. The guy like like the font of my third design and he just want the "Paceo" text italicized and the background to be gold or yellow to suit the theme color of the inn. He drove a car with me and showed me the place. I took some pictures and I'm gonna fit some of it to a flier that now will show the final logo design as well. I'll convince him to put the logo outside the inn so my art makes it to the side of a highway LOL.