Greetings Dear Artists,
I have been busy, busy planning paintings, stretching watercolor paper, painting a painting a day and taking this time to say hello. I decided to give up my laziness and start on painting a SERIES of the same subject.
This is the best way for an artist to grow. I used this idea in my art classroom. I had my students pick their best workk. They were asked to change one thing and then repaint it. We did this three times. They might change the composition in the first one. Next, they took the ‘remake’ and changed something in that too, like the value or color scheme, or deleting something in it. By this time they were cozy with the subject and felt comfortable with changing it.
Then I asked my class to abstract it, and not worry about proportion. Many master artists like Modigliani used this. He elongated the figure proportions. Braque tried cubism. A good starter is to teach about artists of the 20th century who stepped out of the box and experimented with new ideas.
I won’t be long with this post. I spend about 6-7 hours a day developing a painting. My average is about twenty four hours in work time. I put the art work away to get a new perspective of it the next day or two when I self-critique the work. Most of the time, I find imbalances in contrast or color or horizontal lines are dipped a little. Then my time is spent correcting.
When the painting seems perfect, I take a digital photo of it with my iPad and save it as a RAW file. The size from the device is seventy-two in resolution and looks great on my monitor which views things in 72. However, for a painting to be printed, it has to be bumped up gradually in my Photoshop app to three hundred. This is a big file and would slow up the computer and take a lot of storage space.
I resolve that issue by making a file called Master Paintings. I save it on my 62G-USB drive. That saves me time later so I don’t need to take another RAW. It is easy to reduce this file to a smaller size to send in an email or post online. Remember. The large file is just for printing purposes. Most of the time I use my 72 file.
You can get a lot of info about this and in much more detail online. Google ‘ How do I convert a RAW file to send to a Printer?’ A free app that can do this for you is called PixLR. You can get it by searching in Google.
Happy painting!
