Tag: tree

Volleyball Court in the Library Park

Every now and again a small group of us meets at the park behind the library in town. Usually it is on a Monday, and I have been able to make it to the last two after missing so many it has been months. It’s a very nice group of people, from pencil artists to painters, and we are led by our wonderful teacher, Steve. We are usually there for a couple of hours in the morning.

The park itself is a bit small, but there are picnic tables, party areas, benches, playgrounds, and volleyball courts. Add a pond and ducks and a lot of trees, and it adds up to a very pleasant place to be. Today, in keeping with my more direct approach to painting, I brought along the Vision paper so I would be forced to work without a lot of messing around. The point of this study was to preserve the white – or add white as needed – to the volleyball net. The rest was whatever! Of course, more direct painting was the other, secondary goal.

Watercolor, 9 x 12 Vision watercolor paper, 140# CP.

Suburban Notan

Suburban Notan

Putzing around a bit, I decided to take an image I had developed a week or so ago and take it somewhere. No idea about the camera, but it is Fujicolor film. I desaturated it and then pushed it to extremes in black and white – I like to do this when considering a subject for value studies, whether I painted it already, or plan to paint it. Below is the color version.

Just as an aside, this is my favorite tree in the neighborhood. In the fall all the leaves are scattered around, bright yellow. In the spring, they come back slowly, little bright bits of green and then a full canopy. The shape is very symmetrical at the height of summer.

The above was a series of five or six pictures fused together into a panorama. The original pano was not as detailed – the image was a bit soft – but I wanted the texture of the trunk to show clearly.

35mm Fujicolor 100 film, scanned with a Pakon 135, and again with a PrimeFilm XA Super using Silverfast 8e.

Magic Fujicolor Panoramic Tree!

Tree

I haven’t done any film photography for about 2 years, but I finally took a roll of FujiColor 100 I had finished awhile ago in to the lab to be processed. No idea what camera I used. I asked for only processing, no scans or prints.

Once home, I ran the film through both my Pakon 135 scanner and then my PrimeFilm XA Super Edition scanner using SilverFast 8e (free version for this scanner). I ran it as negatives but used the infrared clean up on all of my images. Once all processed, I merged the 5 images which make up this one without doing any clean up post Negative Lab conversion. This image is the one I used with SilverFast, and I am pretty pleased with the end results. I didn’t do any color shifts or anything in post, just used my standard frame and trimmed the raw edges down a bit.

I really like my Pakon scanner – I got it in the days of yore when cheap – and have a dedicated XP laptop for use with it. However, when I went looking for a scanner which was not consigned to the world of XP only, I came across the Prime Film on recommendation by a video on YouTube by “Shoot with Coops”. I have scanned negatives with VueScan, but there is not clean up. This roll of film was horribly scratched and really would have not been worth any time in removing the dots and scratches by hand. SilverFast works really beautifully, I think, and even though I had to putz around to get things working, straight out of scan and Neg Lab, I like the results.

I plan to get out and do more film photography as summer progresses. Film just has an extra something which digital lacks. I like scanning my own film – it saves a lot of money for one thing – but there are a lot of frustrations which go along with it. Dirt, scratches, and software. Yes, film can be scanned, but the quality of the scanner and the software can make or break it for you. Silverfast is often offered as a free scanning software. What I like about it is that each scanner has its own specific version, and the free one is really, really good. I use the Epson V600 for 120 film, and that works well enough with the native software, but not for 35mm.

So . . . no drawing today, but a foray into another picture making process.

Sweet Lavender

More gouache! Such a lovely, forgiving medium. Mistake? Dry, re-wet, blend some more, paint over. Can you really ask for more? The only problem with artist’s gouache is that it stays water soluble when you are done with the painting, but there are ways to seal it and make it waterproof. I think I will try that out on some gouache painting failures – like my snow scene of yesterday.

After getting lost in a drift on that snowy road of yesterday, off in my Learjet for warmer climes and roads easier to navigate. May as well time travel a bit, too, and move from winter to late summer.

Back to lavender fields! The ones I have been doing in acrylic are a bit gaudy, but so is lavender. Some lavender is light, some is so dark it rivals the deep blues of lobelia. I tried to strike a bit of a more subdued approach to a large amount of lavender, and I think it works pretty well.

Artist’s gouache on bristol paper; about 8×10.