Did a shortish dragon fruit still-life study tonight. I wasn’t planning to since I am extremely tired today, but I wanted to do a little in case they don’t look as fresh tomorrow. They are so gorgeous fresh. Ever since I painted the onion, I’ve been drooling to paint a dragon fruit. They have the most … I can only describe their forms as “visual appetizing.” I love them!
They also have much more complicated forms than an onion, and drawing one was more difficult than I thought it would be since it isn’t as common a shape. Maybe I will work on it some more tomorrow night so it looks as finished as the onion.
They also taste incredible. They have a texture similar to a kiwi and taste similar to a cross between a kiwi and some kind of berry. The center is sweeter than the outer parts of the flesh. The flesh of the fruit is either white or ruby-colored, and flecked with black seeds that look and crunch just like a kiwi’s. I’d like to paint a cut-up dragon fruit next!
MagicPicker Color Wheel
I also recently acquired a new color wheel for Photoshop that I adore! It’s Anastasiy’s MagicPicker Color Wheel. I’ve tried several color wheel plugins for Photoshop, and his is far and away the best one. It’s much faster than the other two I’ve tried and I am very happy I have it now. It noticeably speeds up my workflow in Photoshop when I use it, and feels very natural. I avoided using Photoshop for drawing before learning there even were color wheel plugins, actually, because it just wasn’t as much fun or intuitive to use as Paint Tool Sai’s or Painter’s color wheels.
That’s a main point, too – Anastasiy’s color wheel makes painting in Photoshop so enjoyable to use. It is refreshing to not have to open a color box or move three sliders, and to simply be able to visually and quickly choose a color and paint it on the canvas. I also like that his color wheel is resizable. You can make it as large or small as you want. It’s very flexible!
Lastly, I also like that it has the option to have a true, traditional RYB color wheel. All the other Photoshop color wheel plugins use a RGB color wheel, so it is less readily usable if you want to use the wheel for basic color theory. For example, using the RGB color wheel, it would show that the complement to red is cyan instead of what it should be in real life – green. MagicPicker’s traditional color wheel shows the correct relationships between colors.
I’d highly recommend it! For me, having a color wheel for Photoshop is like having a completely new program. How can I go back! Check it out on his site, there is a fun painting demo featured that uses it. Anastasiy is also a great guy and extremely helpful, he’s a wonderful asset to the digital art community. Thanks for developing and maintaining such an enjoyable and useful color wheel, Anastasiy!
