The Bertha Painting

Danny Doran

Clicks: 443

02/18/2018

Bertha is missing teeth, her left ear is folded up from a bad case of cauliflower ear and she's also about ten pounds overweight. None the less, she's still a beautiful beast and today she made a great subject for painting.

Sweet Dreams Bertha

I'm not an artist (obviously), but today I was inspired to put paintbrush to canvas. Well, digital paintbrush and canvas that is. I created the painting on my laptop using the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). GIMP is essentially the free and open source version of Adobe Photoshop. While I was photoshopping some (late) Valentine's Day cards for my girlfriend, I came across the Bob Ross Technique in GIMP. Absolutely bizzare!

I had to try it out for myself, so I grabbed a stylus pen and used the touchscreen on my laptop to draw for the first time. An hour went by full of "little friends" for the trees and "happy little accidents". I painted a mountain range with an open sky and reflective lake. Being the proud, twenty-one year old, up-and-coming artist that I was, I rushed out of the basement of my parent's home to present my work to mom. She had recently started painting sessions with friends.

It was upstairs, armed with my mother's praise, that I laid eyes upon she who would become the subject for my magnum opus.

I spent the next couple of hours striking thousands of brush strokes. Bertha spent those hours sleeping.