Pretty lurid, wouldn’t you say? I would, for sure!
I scanned this painting, and in Lightroom and Photoshop, pushed and pulled the colors until they were off the chart – but got the effect I wanted. Tropical fish in the deep sea have so many magical colors. I like it much, much better than the original. And, it is interesting what one can do in the computer age – certainly I could not have accomplished this with my current sets of paints.
Gotta swim in the digital world now and again!
One thing I find interesting is my need to “drop bombs” on my daily life. What this means is simply that getting into a rut is not a good thing, and shaking up the patterns and routines are necessary to keep life interesting. For example, I have settled into this pattern: coffee, breakfast, clean up myself and the house, figure out evening meals, and then paint and draw. Much as I like the last, I find myself getting stuck in a rut. The other things I like doing don’t get done. And, I get really bored; worse, I feel like I am not “accomplishing” anything! That’s the problem with having a lot of interests and an impatient, restless personality. I irritate myself as well as others.
The other day, I finally got around to buying a new laptop computer. My old ones were worthless except as boat anchors. Poor graphics and connectivity. Slow. I have one, a Windows XP machine dedicated to my film scanner. Another was not forward compatible with Windows – can you believe that??? Anyway, as a result, I had to clean up the bloat ware on the new laptop and install software I use. With everything internet-based, it’s interesting to now own a laptop with only a few external connections and no DVD drive. The result was I finally broke down and decided to enroll in Lightroom CC for photography.
I really like LR as a jump-off point for other software to edit photographs. The catalog system is great. However, the Creative Cloud version has some things I need to learn! I have never been a cloud-based person, preferring to keep stuff on my own hardware rather than rely on others to take care of me. As times change, though, so must we, even if I am not sure this is always for the best. What I know I will like is being able to access my photos from either my laptop or my home computer without having to use sneaker net anymore. That is also what I like about Google and being able to sync across computers.
The challenge here is making sure I do what I like. It’s actually very hard to find time to do all the things I want to do. 
Poor weather has kept me in the house a lot – who wants to go out in pouring rain? – but that is like house arrest after a bit. The LR is going to be a challenge, and fun. The bigger challenge is to find the time to do so many other things!
I have made one promise to myself, though: I will draw or paint every day, no matter what else is on the agenda.
I’ve taken photos for years and use different software to enhance the final results to express what I want. With this painting, I was not quite sure about the distant cliffs and the depth of color in the ocean. Too light? Darken? My instinct was that darkening both would make a better painting in the sense of contrast.
Overall, I like the above painting – it looks pretty good. In the one below, I used a brush in Lightroom to darken the cliffs and the sea.
I like the second choice better. I haven’t painted over the cliffs or ocean to make them darker, but if I were to publish things, I could do some “post” in a digital format. If you look at the frame of the above image, you will see parts of it are darker, the result of using the LR brush.
I wonder how many other artists do post-processing of their paintings. I have taken scans and turned them into black and white images to check contrast and value – so why not for making painting decisions as well? It’s all a learning process.
Needing to travel light, I took only my Chrome Book, my Nikon V3, the Olympus OM-1n, and the Olympus XA4. I used up 3 out of 10 rolls of film, and probably blew one of those. I thought I had used a 4th roll, and maybe I did, but cannot seem to find it. I used a Chrome-OS based editor called Polarr, but found the Chrome Book a bit too small to do much editing. I backed up all my images onto an external HD, a 1.5 TB “My Passport.”
The first stop on our trip was Flagstaff, Arizona, for two nights. We stayed at the England House B&B to use as our jumping-off points for the Grand Canyon and Sedona. Our hosts, Richard and Laurel, were full of great information, and sent us out to the Grand Canyon to a very specific spot from which we could peer into the depths of the Grand Canyon. We made a few stops as we drove into the Grand Canyon National Park.
The first stop was the Desert View Watchtower designed by Mary Colter, who was quite an amazing woman. If you have a chance to visit the Desert View Tower, take the time to do so. Not only is the Tower a piece of fascinating architectural design and execution, the views are worthwhile. Take the time to walk around it, find the little corners, and stop for a moment to appreciate the grandeur of the view and the vision of Ms. Colter.
From the Desert View Watchtower, we drove deeper into the park, following the specific directions from Richard and Laurel. It is a pullout leading to a fire road, and about a 20 minute walk through a pine wood. The air is aromatic, redolent with the spices of high desert plants – resinous and sweet.
Flowers and grasses grow between the pine trees, and old, dead trees have become architectural designs created by nature, with the details of their structure revealed in their craggy lines and intimate remains.
Finally, at the end of the road, a picnic area opens up at the very edge of the Grand Canyon, which drops below you a mile. No fences protect you. No one tells you not to jump. You find a place to stop, and look, to hold on to. Birds such as ravens and raptors fly above you, only to drop down into the Canyon. The Colorado river, a deep muddy red, flows at the very bottom. As the sun shifts and clouds move, the colors of the Canyon change. It’s a mesmerizing, enchanting, and magical place – far too big and grand to be seen in one day.
I used the Nikon V3 with the 1 Nikon 10-100mm lens for most – if not all – of these images, with post in Lightroom and On1.
Another image from the Moonrise Trail. Because it varies from sunny to shady, it’s a great place to play with exposure and other photo-y things, like compensation, speed, and aperture.
This was taken using the Canonet GIII QL17, Agfa Vista 200, and scanned at home using the Pakon NonPlus. Some tweaks in LR and On1.
Ink, Yarn & Beer 