Photo Doctoring

I have digital photos of my old-fashioned paintings (as in colored paste applied to fabric using sticks tipped with animal hair). Unfortunately it is very difficult to get decent photos of a canvas. Glare and reflection are a big problem. Taking the photo with the canvas at a slight angle, not perpendicular to the camera reduces this problem but creates another one. The image of the painting is no longer square and the painting is slightly distorted. Here I did an excercise to correct these problems. I used transform/skew to adjust the distortion and to square-up the image. To eliminate the picture frame and extraneous photo margins I then selected the image with the rectangular marquee tool and cut-pasted into a new file. Viola', art-work photo on the cheap!

Up with CHANNELS

Here I did an exercise in selections and channels. I began with a photo that I had previously used to make a painting (a real painting) that I was never happy with. Though similar, this one is better and it didn't use $20 worth of paint!

A first brush with PAINTER

Now that everyone has mastered the intricacies of Photoshop (just kidding) we begin learning a new program, Painter. Powerful and more like making art the old fashioned way because of the Wacom tablet, a virtual sketchpad interface.

The selection of artist tools is overwhelming. So here we are at the bottom of another steep learning curve.

Since I couldn't access photos I had on  a flash card due to...anyway, I resorted to real life drawing with the Wacom tablet of a fellow art student. Sketched, painted, erased all on the Wacom. This exercise used the technology in the simplest way; as a replacement for brushes paint and paper, no fancy tricks. 

The eraser feature of the backside of the pen is very expedient, however I kept activating some feature by accident that was turning it into a magnification tool that I couldn't figure how to turn off (very annoying). 

Hold the space bar down then click and move the canvas around, very handy. Ctrl + or -  are the way to enlarge and reduce, there is no navigation window like in PS.

The Wacom tablet isn't large enough to operate some of the long pull down menus so I find myself going back and forth between the tablet for drawing and painting and mostly using the touch pad of the computer for managing tools, operations, and files. It is instinctive to try and use the Wacom tablet like a touch pad, too bad it doesn't work like that.

Virtual Art or Vapor Art?

Well...I got a little carried away. Colored under-layers and some erasing all behind a doodle composite that began as an exercise in extracting a pen and ink drawing.

To the untrained eye this might look like an ugly mess, and maybe it is.

To my eye it has redeeming qualities, the colors, the textures, the movement.... I rest my case.

No it won't be on my next Christmas card, I probably won't even print it, it is just an experimental art happening for the moment. No big investment of energy, or materials, or fore-thought...

Perhaps that is why I distrust this technology, art becomes disposable just like everything else in this modern age of technology and consumerism.

"Vapor-art!"

Thanks to todays advanced technology and manufacturing we all get to have lots of stuff and most of it is broken.

Bits and bytes, zeros and ones, dust to dust in a digital age.

Head-space

Another composite of doodle images. I used the image/transform function repeatedly for resizing and repositioning the various elements. I had many layers containing single elements. A cumbersome way of doing this probably but I am feeling my way along at this point. 

Doodling 'round

I've worked up two pieces so far where I am trying to create a palette, so to speak, of discrete line drawn images to use as elements within a composition. 

For my exercise I have collected dozens of random doodles that I find within the note pages from when I am working by telephone or am in a long meeting. The doodles are interesting to me not because I think they are good drawings or are art per se, but because they are created mostly by the subconcious mind with very little active attention. The images seem to appear of their own accord and I wonder where they come from the same as I wonder at a strange dream. Indeed I find the images that I am producing from these are rather dream -like. I chose to use an oval shape for this composition which is like a mandala.

For a time Carl Jung would literally lock himself in his basement in the evening where he wished to be undisturbed so that he could paint mandala images. I don't believe anyone ever saw these mandala paintings.  Perhaps he only needed a doodling pad by his telephone. Or perhaps he preferred the basement to his wives company.

    

Collage in College?

As an excercise in moving back and forth between analog (material) and digital methods, we constructed collages. Mine is made from magazine cuttings and is augmented with felt marker and white-out pen. It has an industrial look and it reveals my appreciation for cubism. I used some areas of text for a textured-gray quality.

After scanning the collage I used Photoshop to manipulate the digital image. I added digital brushwork

to brightening up the existing color scheme.