Sometimes you just rummage through things. This morning I was rummaging from my LightRoom archives, going as far back as 1999! This is from 12/23/2011 using the Nikon D70, on loan from a friend, and a Tamron 28-75 lens, the first I ever bought. This was snapped in the early morning, after a bit of rain, a few days before Christmas. The edit is from this morning.
How time just flies!
Edge of the old year, edge of the new year. A point where something morphs into something else. A precipice.
Let 2025 begin!
Scanning – sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it. It is usually better than trying to take a photo of a painting though . . . .
I used Epson V600 Epson Scan on one of these; VueScan on the other.
Above was done using VueScan. It captures the colors better but is a bit dark. Below, the greens of the trees and bushes are better captured.
More of the colors show up using Epson Scan, but they are a little too intense.
Sigh.
The fact is that scanning and post-production can really influence how a painting looks. This goes whether the painting is scanned and interpreted using software, or photographed, and then interpreted and adjusted using software. If you look up a painting on the internet and then look at all the images of it, you know what I mean – colors can vary dramatically.
All this techno speak aside, I like them both for different reasons. Both do capture the moodiness of the original watercolor, which I like. Perhaps that is the most important thing – the mood is caught?
Watercolor, Arches 140# CP, 10×14.
It is exactly a week before Christmas. Today, in SoCal, the wind is blowing, there are fire warnings, and it is about 77F (25C). It is a bit warm. Snow seems to be a good subject to watercolor!
The focal point of painting this picture, besides wanting a bit of snow for the season, is to see if I could catch the softness of the bare birch trees that act as a barrier between the snowy foreground and the mountainous background. Anyone who has seen the leafless birch trees at a distance knows that there is a sort of haziness as all their branches overlap and merge into a softness with some detail and without much detail at all.
I used a relatively limited palette – mostly ultramarine, Hooker’s green, burnt sienna and umber. In some areas I used titanium white gouache, partly to place definite snowy details as well as to blur into the birch branches to create that softness I wanted to express.
Not a bad way to spend an afternoon out of the wind!
Watercolors, Arches 140# CP, 10×14, some gouache.
Ink, Yarn & Beer 