Impressions of San Gregorio State Beach

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.

Winter in the White Mountains

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.

Beach at Saint-Malo

Remember the story All the Light We Cannot See? Ever since, the city has intrigued me. The story is worth reading, and if I remember, the movie was decent as well.

This painting was a quick one, and it turned out pretty good in my opinion. The point was to just paint, as well as to try out a new-to-me watercolor paper. This paper is St. Cuthberts Mill’s Bockingford paper. It seems to be a fairly soft paper as the tape around the edges of the painting pulled up some of the paper even though the tape was on the paper itself for only a short time. Using the heat of a hair dryer solved this problem, like it usually does. I liked this paper, though it does buckle a bit more than I expected when wet, but in the end it has proven to be well behaved.

Initially I scanned this painting on my Epson V600 scanner using the Epson software. Contrast was harsh and the sky barely showed up. I have had issues with watercolors and the software before – not at all pleasant to see – and then I suddenly remembered I have VueScan by Hamrick. I closed out the Epson software and fired up VueScan – and, oh, what a beautiful difference! This software is something I bought years ago, and I never really thought about using it for watercolors – I use it for photos I plan to run through Negative Lab Pro. Well, I guess I will have another use for it as well! Sheesh.

Watercolor, St. Cuthberts Mill Bockingford, 12 x 16, CP 140#.