New Weekly Promotional Painting for Sale!

Hawaiian Sunset

     I offer a weekly promotional painting every week on Fridays, This week is early because I won't be available, but normally it is Friday through Sunday. This is an awesome way to get a high quality gallery wrapped canvas print for a much more affordable price. Each of my paintings will be offered this way only once, so it is important to check back each week and subscribe to my blog so you'll be the first to know about these deals.

     Anyways, this weeks promotional painting is my Hawaiian Sunset painting. I decided to go large with this print as it would look great as a large canvas print for a living room or office. The size of this canvas print is 36x24 inches and it is offered at only $100! This is more than $120 off the regular price for this size! Offer is good for only 5 prints and only until Sunday at Midnight, which ever comes first, so be sure to check it out here http://fineartamerica.com/weeklypromotion.html?promotionid=193574.

This painting was painted digitally on an iPad using the app ProCreate. 

Note that any watermarks you may see on the images, do NOT appear on the final purchased print.

Thanks for looking!

--Becky Herrera

www.beckysdigitalart.com

www.pixelpaintcreations.blogspot.com

What To Do when Your Back Up Isn't A Backup?

     Well I had a little minor catastrophe yesterday. Since I’ve had issues with computers in the past and losing valuable data, I’ve learned one thing. Backup and do often and in several places. Don’t rely on one back up either. This I found to be true yesterday. 

     It all started with me actually wanting to do my weekly backup. Relying heavily on my iPad and computer, I back up regularly. I do a weekly backup of my iPad on iTunes  as well as have the iCloud backup feature turned on. Since iOS 9 though, iCloud backup isn’t reliable so I don’t hold too much comfort in it. Yesterday at the time of catastrophe, the last iCloud backup I had was 4/19/16. So my main back up method of my iPad, where my art is contained, is iTunes. Imagine my horror when I plug in to do my backup and I get several errors, a trigger on my antivirus and a message saying that my iPad couldn’t be backed up because of incompatible data. What?! I try again, same error. I try to restore from a previous backup from a week ago and here is the clincher. That backup was corrupted as were the last three before that. 

     Well after a little freak out session, I took my computer and iPad to my brother who does computer work for a living. He took a look. Apparently my iPad had a windows virus on it and was trying to infect my computer. Considering I have a Mac and not a PC it didn’t infect my computer but it did corrupt backups and prevented any new backups from being made. Because Apple loves keeping things a secret, it is very difficult accessing certain parts of the iPad, at least with out jailbreaking it. We tried restoring from the iCloud backup I did have. It restored, but with the stinking virus on it. 

     Now I was irritated but not too worried as I had backups of most important stuff, except one thing I neglected. This is where my heart dropped in my stomach. I hadn’t backed up the actual art work that I was working on in my art app, ProCreate. I had the png files but not the open layers files. My snow leopard painting that I’m almost finished with wast there. I had to save it! So with the restored but virus ladened iPad I exported the .procreate files for the 4 pieces I was working on. The .procreate files are like .psd aka photoshop files that keep layers intact. In fact you can export .psd files instead from ProCreate if you wanted to. I uploaded them to my iCloud Drive which is one of my many cloud backups. They were safe. The next thing my brother recommended was to wipe the iPad and start new. That means no restore from a previous back up. The thing I dreaded came to be. Reluctantly I made sure everything I wanted to keep was safe and we hit the nuke button. 

     I set up the iPad as new, and got my settings back in order. I then downloaded my most used apps aka ProCreate and a few others. I imported some of my photos and imported my brush settings and .procreate files back to ProCreate. YAY! They opened up and work. I didn’t lose any artwork!. I actually really didn’t lose anything this time around. I probably will find something gone eventually, but the stuff I need now is safe.

     What’s the lesson here. Don’t rely on one back up method and have several different backups of valuable documents.

Yay! She is saved!

So what is my back up methods?

     First, I have my full backups. I backup to iTunes once a week and try to back up to iCloud nightly. Sometimes that works, sometimes not, so I don’t rely on iCloud backup to heavily. I also will backup to iTunes if I have a major project that I progressed on so I don’t lose anything. The bad thing about these types of backups, like iTunes and Time Machine  is that they can fail and you can’t recover individual files from them if needed. It is an all or nothing approach. 

     To remedy this disadvantage, I make copies of valuable files in three different locations locally and 3 different locations that are cloud based. The things I back up are all my finished art files, my ebooks, photos, and music. They reside on an external hard drive, a flash or thumb drive, and an sd external storage drive. These are all kept in sync with a program called D sync. 

     I also have these same files in the cloud as well. I use my iCloud drive which is different than an iCloud backup. You can send individual files to iCloud Drive and pull them down as well. I also use dropbox for a few things like my Procreate brushes. I only have the free version of Dropbox so not a lot of storage. I also use a program called sugar sync which is ok and keeps certain folders on my computer in sync with the cloud. The final program I use is Crashplan. It makes a copy of files and folders I choose both locally on an external drive as well as in the cloud on their servers. 

     Some data specific backups that I use are Amazon for my ebooks iTunes Match for my music and iPhoto for my pictures, mind you I have local backups of all these files as well. 

     So you see, I might have backup overkill here, but after losing data in the past I’d rather be prepared than not. This is especially true now that my business relies on the data on my computer. and iPad.

     There are advantages of being a digital artist. Being able to change things on the fly, experimenting and not committing to a certain style eat. One disadvantage, is that our digital creations are just pixels until printed out, and they can easily be destroyed all with a simple computer crash.

     The general recommendation for backups is to have at least 2 local or onsite backups and one cloud based. I have more but then I am paranoid like that. One big tip for other digital artists out there, while you may be backing up your completed works, don’t forget to back up those in progress works complete with the layers. Backup the .psd files in photoshop or the .procreate files in Procreate. and don’t rely on one method for all your backup needs.

Hope this helps!

—Becky Herrera

www.beckysdigitalart.com

Weekly Promotional Painting

Friday Promotional Painting!

Horse Portrait Close Up

     Every Friday I offer one of my paintings as a limited time promotion.  The promotion is for an 11x14 inch gallery wrapped canvas for only $50! This is approximately 50% off the regular price which makes it such a great deal. Each painting is only offered once this way and is limited to only 5 prints. The sale ends on Sunday at midnight.

This weeks promotional painting is my "Horse Portrait Close Up." This is one of my earlier digital works but I still really like it. I was actually still using custom brushes back then and created one to create the fur texture of this bay colored horse. This painting was created on an iPad 4 using the apps Procreate and Sketchbook Pro. It would look great in a living room or office or maybe the tack room of a ranch. This would also make a great gift for any horse lover as well.

Thanks for looking and stay tuned for future sales and promotions!

--Becky Herrera

www.beckysdigitalart.com

What is Digital Art?

Digital Art

Work in Progress of Oscar

Painting of my cat Oscar

 So what is digital art really? According to wikipedia, Digital Art can be defined as any art that is made with the help of a computer. Drawings made on paper that are scanned in and changed in any way on the computer, photographs that are modified, 3D characters created using a computer are all examples of digital art. There are so many misunderstandings surrounding digital art, that in most circles, it isn’t even really taken seriously. This is a really sad situation. Most people think of photoshop filters when they think of digital art. They think of photo manipulation or that  someone puts a few photo color filters on and they are done. This isn’t true and even good photo manipulation can be an art form. There are many great artists on Fine Art America that use photo manipulation to a great end. They are usually photographers, but not always. 

     Then there is digital painting. Digital painting is basically painting using a stylus or mouse and creating the brush strokes on either a tablet or in the computer. There are even tablets to plug into the computer to make the painting process a little easier and more intuitive. Don’t get me wrong though, there is a learning curve when painting digitally, even when the artist may be an accomplished painter in traditional media.

Digital painting is an amazing art form and many effects can be achieved through it. Unlike in photo manipulation, digital painting starts out with a blank, digital canvas just as a traditional painter would. The digital artist builds up layers of color and digital paint to achieve the same thing any traditional painter would, a work of art. It may take less time to create, which is an argument of many traditional painters, but that is just because the digital painter doesn’t have any drying  or wait times. Most of my paintings take 10-15 hours to complete and sometimes more. I notice the better I get, the longer a painting takes. The following painting of "The Duel" took about 15 hours.

The Duel

 

 A digital artist and traditional artist are very similar. While an oil painter uses canvas and oil paints to make their art, a digital artist uses a digital canvas and pixels for paint to create theirs. Not one is better than the other, they are just different forms of art and each takes a unique set of knowledge and talent to achieve the end result, a work of art.

In closing, digital art is just the latest art form of the 21st century, it is stigmatized because it is new, just like watercolor was when it was new and colored pencils were 20 years ago. Even photography was stigmatized when the first cameras came out. 

Digital art is just art. The computer and the program are the tools, like brushes, pencils and paper,  but the artist is the one that uses those tools to create the masterpiece.

Example of fractal art

Example of fractal art

-Becky Herrera

www.beckysdigitalart.com