Another Finished Painting.

Today I finished up another new painting. This is to be a gift to our good friends Marty and Diane who live in San Diego. A short while ago we went to their wedding and from the many photographs I took that day, I have composed a painting to commemorate their wedding.

It is on a 16 x 20 inch canvas and shows head and shoulder poses of them looking at each other. As is common for me, the image was derived from several photographs. No one image had exactly the expressions that I needed to capture. One of the advantages that an artist has over a photographer is that he may improve on nature. Or at least choose the best parts of several shots.

Hopefully this coming week I will be able to drop it off at my photographer for him to take the usual high resolution image, and then I will mail it to them.

Time For Another New Painting

My two paintings in progress are almost finished. "The Story Teller" was signed this morning, and given an all over coat of medium. It looks as though it will need another coat Sunday.

My as yet un-named small Art Fund donation painting is still very sticky and will need some minor touch up before signing off and coating with medium. Just heard this morning it has to go to the gallery Monday. It will be tight, but doable.

So it is time to select the next work.

We went to a wedding in San Diego about a month ago. A long time friend and a widower, married a lovely lady. I took a lot (over a hundred) of photographs at the wedding and am planning to develop a painting of them both. I liked the way the "Muni" two person painting came out and am thinking of another two person head and sholders painting.

So this afternoon I went through all the images and chose several that look good as raw material. There is one pose that looks particularly great, though the man's eyes are shut. So I searched out several other of his face images and will fill in the eyes as appropriate.

I put the basic pose image through Photoshop Elements, and cropped the image to approximately the painting format. And then I made a high contrast, sharpened, black & white image, and reduced it to approximately two inches tall. This I printed out on paper and will use tonight to project an outline onto a 16 x 20 inch blank canvas using my opaque projector.

Hopefully the canvas will be ready to begin painting tomorrow.