Evening Stream
An autumn evening: a stream comes out of the sunset glow, over a little fall, past a cabin with its lamp lit.
How it is made
Painted on one shared canvas (pkcanvas) with the newer paintkit tools and no landscape helper. A criss-cross sky comes from a broad brush loaded with two neighbouring sky colours; clouds are scumbled in tiny circles (pkscumblein) and lit along their lumpy undersides by the same brush's /Light, as from the glow below; a cloud's body is worked wet into the sky with pkwet /PerFill, which asks the sky's own colour at each stroke's place, so the body's top edge settles into the darker sky above it; a backlit wood is tapped in with pktap and a loaded pkdab, its reflection pulled down whole by one directional pkwet. Autumn trees take warm highlights and cool shadows, evergreens a fan loaded dark and lit with /Light, the rocks and cabin come from a palette knife, a pkpull fall and grass finish the bank, and pkzigzag light on the water is caught on the canvas weave. The stream's banks, its head, the far shore and the near banks' rims are brushed with pkbrushedge, so no big mass keeps a ruled vector edge: the far shore and the banks carry the meadow's own light to the edge (a procedural /Mass, lit under the glow and plain toward the viewer), and a near bank cuts the stream back in exactly where the stream runs behind it (a region list for /Under).
Details
- Category
- Painting
- Tags
- landscape
- Libraries
- artkit, paintkit
- Added
- 2026-10-14
- Built in
- issue #187
- Page size
- 760 × 560 points
Source
View source the whole program in a scrolling window, or read gallery/evening_stream.ps on GitHub. To draw it yourself, from a checkout of the repository:
pscat --page 760x560 gallery/evening_stream.psThe first 40 of 800 lines of the source
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%Title: Evening Stream — a second wet-on-wet landscape, on loaded brushes and one canvas
%%Creator: pscat — issue #187, epic #112's second landscape
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 760 560
%%EndComments
% An autumn evening: the sun just down behind a backlit wood, a stream
% coming out of the glow, over a little fall and down to the viewer
% between dark banks, a cabin with its lamp lit, and a near-black
% foreground where only the grass tips catch the last light.
%
% Where Alpine Lake (#118) was painted with single-colour marks, this one
% is painted with the round-2 tools, and each answers one of the gaps
% #118 left:
%
% value range the darks are near black and the only near-whites
% are the glow, its reflection, the fall and the lamp
% double loading /Colors (#183) on pkbroad, pkfan, pktrowel and
% (#183) pkdab: the sky's block-in carries two neighbouring
% sky colours, pines carry dark and lit green with
% /Light toward the sun, the knife carries a lit and a
% shadow edge, the autumn masses a whole palette;
% pkdab /HighlightColor and /ShadowColor give warm
% lights and cool shadows instead of white and black
% motions (#184) pkcrisscross for the sky, pkscumblein's tiny
% circles for the clouds, pkscumble for the foam,
% pktap for the far wood's crest, pkpull for the fall
% and the grass, pkzigzag for the light on the water
% pulled the far wood's reflection is pulled down by a
% reflections directional pkwet (#181) -- one pull for the whole
% (#181) element, because its marks are loaded colours
% pkwet grades for you, not a part-by-part replay
% clouds with form the dark body scrubbed over the whole cloud and
% (#345, #384) worked wet into the sky, then pkscumblein /Light 270
% (a half-light, then its core) lights the lumpy
% underside from the glow below, its load following
% the same sun glow along each cloud (#462)
% and the body worked wet into the sky asked at each
% stroke's own place (pkwet /PerFill, #491), not one sky
% colour per cloud