The show must go on!

The show has begun. Most of the class arrived at the Juneau Arts and Humanities Center at 9 a.m. Thursday the day before the opening. We persevered through a power outage, due to a heavy snow storm, to get the show up on the walls. Luckily the power came on after an hour or so. It helped greatly being able to see what we were doing.

I made some adjustments to earlier works to present in the show. These are the three pieces. 

A good turn-out at the opening. An interesting ceramics display in the main gallery room. Our show occupied the wide hallway. Not a bad space. We filled the available space with over 20 pieces (counting Cathy's matrix of 9 small individual ipod designs as one piece). All of the work is good and shows a wide variety of styles.  John Fehringer did not show work because the technology back-fired on him. The hard drive containing work he planned to print and show decided to exhibit its own artistic temperment and refused to divulge the masterworks stored within.  At the show John busied himself setting out large plates of cheeses and crackers, cookies etc . I conclude from this that perhaps the way to a mans ART is through his stomach.

We each posted our artists statement next to our works. 

The weekly paper "the hooligan" carried a full spread on the various art happenings about town for the gallery walk and December. One of my paintings was displayed on the page along with about 5 other works from other shows. Ironically, they displayed a piece that I didn't even put in the show, also they included the wrong title and a production process that was for a different work. Oh well, just details  suppose.

Refining earlier works

There is nothing like looking back at works from weeks ago to see attributes you wish were different. Unlike our lives, digital art can be changed!

I have increased clarity to the main face in "Dale works late" by adding another layer on top and copying in the original photo, well not the original but an un-cloned version. I then inverted a selection of the face and the pencil and deleted all but. I then softened the edges of remaining selections using an eraser with only 10% opacity.  I also used transform to both shrink and enlarge the various hovering duplicate faces. 

In the "Crazy Dance" I reduced the opacity of the top layer which was partially bucket painted so that more of the original painting shows through. I also redrew some lines that looked too broken and sketchy. Some other minor changes. This one I am fine tuning for our class show that is happening this Friday 12/5/2008 (the gallery walk) at the Juneau Arts and Humanities Center. 

Ends are also beginnings

(Photoshop=PS, Painter X=PX)
As the 'Technology and Art' class draws to a close I hope that Art will continue on. That all of us find the time and inspiration to continue to learn and create. Time is always the biggest problem. Though this is my second time taking essentially the same course I never felt that I was wasting my time. From each class I seemed to pick up something new or get reminded of things that I had not mastered the first time.

I am improving my abilities to use both PS and PX on works and sometimes go back and forth. I find that PS is excellent for doing preliminary work with photos, cropping, light dark adjustments, transforms, and selections. After these processes, PX is a powerful fine- art tool box which I have barely opened. I mostly keep going for pastel brushes so far.

I have been using my cheap home scanner for getting sketches digitized so that I can work with them in both PS and PX. The quality of the scan hardly matters since I merely want a rough layout sketch that I can work over.

Like anything sophisticated, PS and PX will require practice to increase abilities and to learn to work fluidly which is something I now struggle with. When using real materials it is satisfying to work very rapidly when in the mood. The technology is still often a stumbling block in this. I know practice will be the solution.

I will keep a look-out for ideas and will try to make something of them. This will be a means of getting my practice time in. Though digital projects are fun in their own right, and I will find many uses for these skills, I am still thinking that ultimately I want to use this technology to do studies for creating tangible paintings; half paint, half sweat with occasional finger prints. Elements the virtual creations lack. Perhaps these are romantic notions I will out- grow and I will ultimately become a digital artist. These are thoughts I struggle with. Working digitally is easier to set- up to work, the work can go faster, it is far less messy, it is far more flexible-if only my real paint brush had an undo button!

I would love to think of a way to earn some income using art; perhaps a second career. Real painting is probably not a way to do that, especially with my bent for abstraction which is not marketable. Clearly digital art technology is the fast road to commercial art applications.

As a part of my ongoing art practice I am thinking I will continue to make entries into this blog. It makes a useful reservoir of efforts including exercises with new techniques and tools. My notes are helpful reminders to myself and may be useful to others. It is also fun to have interested friends look at the site.

Different strokes...

Spending some time working PX. Painting on 10 layers so that changes and colors are somewhat partioned. Various layer can be clicked on or off to see if they improve the look or detract. This view shows all layers. 

Picture this.

Experiments using PS only.  Careful cropping followed by light-dark and saturation adjustments. Then filters applied. Trying to remember, bristle-brush or watercolor or one of each. 

Dancing with PS

Trying modifications to an existing painting using PS.  A  chance to look at variations on a theme. It should be easy to identify the original painting.

A portrait under the influence of "Painter"

Both PS and PX were used extensively to doctor up this portrait Photo. I used PS to select Dales profile. I could then brighten his image leaving the background very dark for a bit of Rembrandt-like drama. Then I worked in PX. Used quick clone to alter photo to a painting look then I added and painted on over-layers to give the portrait a modern spin and emotional feel. I also copied the lit portion of the face and duplicated it. These duplications are on their own layers and I inserted them between various other layers.

Stretching my abilities in PS

The original photo is included here. My idea was to capture both a starkness and the mystery and foreboding found in the interstices of things. Used PS to exacerbate and dramatize elements in the photo. I wanted to alter the perspective to tipped-in verticles making it over-towering. This is easily done using Transform/perspective, however the top of the whole image is pulled together so that the full rectangular format is lost. Sure I could crop the remaining image but then elements are lost from the unstretched bottom of the photo that I want to keep. 

The solution that worked: Before adjusting the perspective I selected a narrow column at the right and left edges, one at a time. Using Transform the selection is stretched sideways to increase to total width of the photo. Then I could adjust the perspective and crop to a rectangle without loosing elements at the bottom. An inflection in the angle of the building caused by the stretching was mostly corrected by carefully selecting that section of the building and using a distort function in Transform. Filled some resulting voids with clone stamp tool. I tested many filters on the image. Though the stretching left a stretched look in those areas the use of filters eliminated the problem. The image here resulted from two filters, watercolor followed by texturizer. There are qualities that will not be apparent in this image due to its size and resolution.

A project to exercise selection primarily. 

A rough poster look

Scanning again. A sketch made from a friends wedding photo. This was on the beach in Seldovia. I did some splashing of color with the paint bucket in PX. Telouse Latrecish perhaps?

Back to using Painter with the scan of a sketch

Used PS to process a scanned sketch, used 'sharpen' and 'sharpen more' to darken the lines. Used magic wand to select non-line areas (tolerance set at about 90 I think)  Deleted to clear non-line areas. In PX created several layers to paint upon, used brush and airbrush. I also created three channels and saved selections as masks for the airbrush painting. As I gain a bit more familiarity with the tools I am using more of them in combination.

another brush with painter

a bit of play with Painter, the brush and a felt marker.

The Austere Beauty of Winter-coming soon!

Here I was revisiting the "quick clone" feature which is the tool that caused me to ask "when is it cheating?" regarding the power of this technology. I worked on this for 1 or 2 minutes before I accidentally hit some function that through me out and I couldn't figure out how to resume. This was done from one of my winter photos. 

Howdy feller, lets chat!

An in-class exercise produced this frightening product. Perhaps it is a start at a business card.

Sketchy Painting

Another exercise painting over a scanned image of a pencil sketch. I put the scanned image on the bottom and painted on several layers above. I also used channels to stencil a couple of areas. I wasn't really finished or satisfied with this project before the program seemed to freeze up. The image here is as far as I got.   

Take Your Pick!
Getting started with a charcoal drawing that I scanned in two parts, due to its oversize, and put back together in PS (Photoshop) during the last class. I thought this would be a nice sketch to practice painting over using PainterX, henceforth referred to as PX. I added three new layers, the original was then on the bottom. I wanted it on top and transparent so that I could paint under the drawing so that it remains clean. I wanted the sketch to remain on the bottom as well. I couldn't get a "click and drag" to work so I made a copy of the bottom layer and pasted it into the top layer. I painted using different colors on the two layers below. By varying the on/off of the various layers several different images can result.

Searched notes for a very useful tool; in PS or PX you can press and hold, shift, command, 4

This allow you to take a snapshot of anything on the sceen. A new plus- sign  like cursor appears, guide it like a selection tool to choose a rectangular area, press return key to capture as a picture suitable for loading on the net, like into a blog for instance.

The sketch came from a group life-drawing session with a paid model. My mother would call this pornography, is it? I hope no one is offended. Hi Mom.

 

 

Beginning a new class in learning the use of computer technology to work in fine art applications. Here we are indoors on a bright sunny day.