Here you see a small portion of the painting at approximately the mid-point of its development. The background seems fairly well integrated with the foreground to my eye, but it’s immediately apparent the artist simply scribble-scribble-scribbled his way through the flowers and leaves.
Strange to say, learning to scribble after years of drawing is at nearly as hard as learning to draw. I’ve had to work at it. I’ll probably never achieve the random, unstudied effect I seek in scribbling, but that certainly doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying. I can’t tell you exactly what I’ll find when I master scribbling, but thus far, I’ve discovered powers of visual concentration I never so much as suspected might exist, as well as great joy in noodling around with my tools purely for the sake of noodling around with them. What’s the point of scribbling? What’s its purpose?
Why, the very doing of it, of course. I’ve spent all my life in pursuit of goals: educational goals, career goals, relationship goals, financial goals, and so many more small and large goals I can truthfully tell you I’m fathomlessly bored with them. When I paint well—only a small portion of the time, to be sure—I paint purely for the sake of painting rather than to produce paintings. There’s nothing digital about art for the sake of art and craft for the sake of craft.
I used Painter’s glass distortion function to texture, smudge, and generally enliven my scribbling. I’ve found that applying a texture, partially undoing it, reapplying it at a smaller percentage of size, partially undoing it, and so forth tends to deliver more interesting results than simply applying a texture. What percentages of sizes and how much to undo? Only trial and error can give you a feel for these powerful tools, and if it need be said, no two paintings call for the same treatment. Nota bene: if your Papers panel doesn’t look like this, fear not, dear reader: I’m using one of Painter’s custom interface schemes.