Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Camera Work.

Like everyone else who remembers the bad old days of the twelve shot roll of Kodak film, I compensate for the trauma of those times by taking endless numbers of photos, all the while trusting that one or two of them might be worth something.

My wife is a graphic designer, and so by the grace of God I have access to the latest and greatest version of Adobe Photoshop. A day gets put aside now and then in order to download all the photos from the phone and the DSLR, and cull the 95% that are worthless.

Once I have some photos worth fooling with, I make duplicates of them. First I tweak the exposure and make the other necessary fixes. Sometimes I go further and adjust things so much that the picture becomes a kind of first round study for the final painting. When things go wrong, the original is still there to start over with.

Once I have something worthwhile I send it to my wife’s laser printer. I let Photoshop manage the color and print on simple HP 90g paper. For whatever reason, it often turns out I need to make the photo on the Mac much lighter than I want, or the picture prints too dark. This is where the “save as” option comes in handy: I still have the version with the right color to refer to, and call it up on the computer screen when necessary.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Ways to Fix a Problem.

Squinting must be one of humanity’s greatest inventions. When I am at a loss about what to do with an unusually obdurate painting, I look at it and squint. Once my headache clears up, I’ve gotten a start on what needs to be simplified or changed.

Maybe this works for me because I give my brain a nice problem: what has to be edited out of a scene so that enough of it remains for the mind to make sense of it? Theoretically the optic nerve is impartial, so I can depend on its decisions.

Another recommended method of determining what’s wrong with a piece that just isn’t cooperating, is to look at it upside down. Frankly this one has never worked that well for me. Still, if some line I’ve convinced myself is ramrod straight just happens not to be so straight, the upside down trick will usually deliver the bad news.

Supposedly, one of the premier challenges for the artist is to know when to stop working on his piece of art. I generally stop when I’m sick of the thing.