Tag: seeing

Drawing Practice

Frustrated with my inabilities to realistically do perspective and depth, which I attribute to my lack of depth perception, I’ve decided to re-edu-um-cate myself!  I signed up for an online gouache class by Lena Rivo, which has been great, as well as bought an eBook version of Bert Dodson’s Keys to Drawing.  I have decided to dedicate part of each day to doing at least one of his exercises if possible.  The hope is to improve my drawing skills, which are the problems behind some of my painting issues.

First exercise is contour drawing.  The purpose of this is to get used to the idea of checking what you see against what you draw, and get the idea into your head that what you see is not what you think.  This means looking at angles and curves as well as relationships of parts to each other.  Here are my exercise examples, diving in feet first!

Next was fun – look at your hand face on – that is, fingers in your face!  Close an eye.  Draw!

And then, imagine a pepper.  Draw it.  Then get a real pepper and take a good, strong look at it, and draw.  My imaginary pepper is at the top, and the real pepper, in three positions and three variations of drawing style, are below.

Very glad I chose to do this!  More to come.

No Color Here

 

Morning Flower, Color

Putzing around with a lot of my images, taken over the years, and all in color, I am looking for ones that I think might look work in black and white. I am looking, analyzing texture and lighting, and then making a conversion to black and white. Mostly I fail.

What I am trying to do is to train my eyes to be able to visualize a picture in black and white before I take it. Given our world is filled with color, I find this especially hard to do. Awhile ago someone told me that people who are color blind in one area or another make great black and white photographers because they do not have the ability to see all the normal range. While I don’t know if this is true or not, I do know that “seeing” in black and white is very difficult for me!

When I first looked at this color picture, it immediately stood out. The original exposure was very dark – underexposed to the point that only the bright white light of the flower stood out. I increased its exposure in LR and saw that it had potential because of the contrast in light and dark. Leaf textures and fine hairs on stems and buds also caught my eye.

Morning Flower

 

I popped it into Silver Efex, and scanned through it. Finally I chose the preset I liked best, and went to work a bit. I increase fine texture, used control points, and then returned to LR for final vignetting and detail enhancement. Last steps were in CS6 for some spot removal and a signature. The end result is not too bad, in my opinion.