Winter: Fireworks MX 2004 Painting

Hit a snag last night trying to figure out why my BitmapData was getting cropped when I was sure my Bitmap was not using a scrollRect. If you don’t know what that means, neither did I at 10:00pm… I just gave up, and went to change my website banner. I wanted to do something Fall related, but… to me, Spring and Fall are just transitory seasons, used to emotionally delay the inevitable, so I went straight for winter.

To me, winter no matter where you are, is harsh and unforgiving. I have a love hate relationship with winter. While I loathe cold, I at the same time feel most alive in freezing weather. I really dislike feeling chilly at all, but being able to deal with such weather certainly makes me feel more awake, aware, and attuned to my surroundings.

I took inspiration from the Silver Marches, a harsh, northern frontier region in nothern Faerun of the Forgotten Realms. To me, that place exemplifies the harshness of people living in the cold of winter. Danger is everywhere, and yet even eeking out a meager living itself is immensely challenging and continues to be every day.

I used the light water color brush with varying weights, as well as thick and heavy brushes for the mountain and moon. I used colored pencil for more detailed areas. I’ve always liked artwork that incorporated water color and colored pencil combined. I think the coolest medium I ever was turned onto was water color pencils by an art teacher in my high school art class. You can draw with them, and then just stroke a wet brush over them, and they turn into water color. It’s awesome. I utilized my Wacom tablet with pen to paint, an Intuos 2 Platnium 9×12.

Although I own Fireworks 8 via Studio 8, Macromedia did something that I consider really stupid. When selecting a brush type, you can preview it’s painting effect in these wonderful popups that show the brush with your current color selection.

For some reason, in 8, you have to actually hover over the brush name itself whereas in MX 2004, you can just hover over the group, and it’ll preview all brushes for that group.

I reckon users who complained where running Fireworks MX 2004 on Pentium 2’s, but I don’t see why I must be punished because I have a fast machine. Sounds like taxing the rich just because they are rich. Stupid.

Anyway, in college, I would of chosen Painter to do something like this, but Fireworks certainly has matured from the “alpha channel PNG maker” that I used it for back in college.

Winter by JXL – Source PNG & JPG

BTW, if you marquee select the 3rd bitmap in the sky layer (Control + Click in MX 2004, Alt + Click in 8), you can make the stars twinkle.