#30×30 2026 : My Kingdom for a Horse

Another late-night sketch in HEAVYPAINT. Maybe three hours?

I feel I’m getting more comfortable – this is my tenth digital try at something in this app. I’ve done a few more random portraits but nothing worth showing. It felt ‘easy’ to me tonight – the process was more natural.

I’m getting the sense of how the direction you rotate the image on-screen relates to the shape of the pen stroke.

If you keep the image vertical all the time, (as it is on an easel), you have to contort your hand. I suppose we do that with a brush, choosing intentionally which direction to place-and-drag each stroke. It’s somehow surprising that this matters here too!

Digital brushes often react ‘procedurally’ to pen tilt, direction and speed of stroke – giving you subtle effects – but because the ‘brush’ is invisible – it’s a bit hard to predict.

I’ve always wished for a digital drawing slate that can feel brush hairs, the same way that it can feel your finger.

I’m also getting a feel for how blending works with these simulated oil brushes – you do need some pixels already on screen in order to get new marks to blend – which is a simulation of the way oil paint works. So it’s worth it to start with a very general, very blocky form, and then paint a refinement pass over top.

I’m working from an inspiration image by @tony.karpinski, who – I am 99% sure is creating his images with AI? He’s a bit coy about how he works :) but they have the hyper-real, uncanny valley look of AI.

Plus and he just posts too much work for them to be anything else.

Which is kind of funny – if the work is good, and there’s too much of it – that’s a dead give away :) :) :)

Hah!

Anyway, I don’t want to debate about the pro’s and cons of AI art here ;) Everyone has a lot to say about that! The images are already generated, I’m not adding to the energy cost. I’m not taking away jobs from artists – this is just low-stakes practice.

I think it’s kind of funny for me to be training myself using an AI image. There is so much conversation about AI being trained off the work of unpaid artists – but this is what artists do all the time! Copy-work is the entire basis of how we learn.

Young artists are going to be in big trouble if nobody is allowed to copy from anyone else :)

Anyhoo – here’s a slideshow of the painting in progress. I remembered to save out images this time!

There is a way to output a process video in HEAVYPAINT but I haven’t spent the time to figure it out. It’s kind of annoyingly computer-y. It seems to want to crunch for a long time on the image (maybe I should’nt be making these at the maximum possible resolution?) and then nothing seems to happen? The file gets saved somewhere in the cloud? I don’t know. If anyone is a HEAVYPAINT pro maybe they can explain this part to me :)

But yes! You can see how organic the painting process is; from block-in, to gradual refinement.

So, I’ll leave you for today with some closeup details.

Thanks everyone!

~m