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Author: Mike_Callahan, Contributing Editor
| To create a painting, the artist uses many tools and technological innovations to not only accomplish the task, but also to make the painting look its absolute best. Throughout history, the technological advances of the day defined the tool. When brush making was perfected and certain hair was discovered to hold paint better than others, the tool was employed. When synthetic fibers were created, the tool evolved (for better or for worse depending on your preference in brushes). When cotton was able to be woven into fabric, canvas became the technological advance of the day. As various grounds were discovered and applied to that canvas prior to painting, the artwork became that much better. The advent of the camera allowed the artist the ability to paint things such as landscapes in his studio rather than on location without concern for the weather, the time of day, or even the time of year. One could go on and on.
We must realize, however, that knowledge is cumulative and advances in technology build upon existing technologies but do not necessarily replace and eliminate them. Because we now have the technology to paint with pixels instead of actual paint, it doesn't mean that traditional methods will be replaced. Rather, in this day of the pixel, the artist's tool box has merely become bigger. Many artists work completely on the computer, never opening a tube of paint or stretching a piece of canvas at all. Many, such as myself, still prefer to employ some of the older technologies by actually brushing paint on a nice, tightly-stretched, white piece of canvas. While digital is a perfectly acceptable media in my estimation, this article deals with the creation of a painting using real oil paint on real canvas, but in the twenty-first century. I don't shy away from modern tools. I believe, like other innovations in history these tools can be employed along with prior ones to make one's work all that much better. Furthermore, I believe they can make the artist's task less arduous, allowing for more enjoyment in the doing of the painting. In this article, I will outline my procedure using the camera and the computer as layout tools showing why I believe the end result is better for it. The following is a chronicle of a current work that I recently produced. |
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| Very early one Saturday morning last August, with the promise of Starbucks® and breakfast, I got my wife, Roben, to accompany me on a forty-five minute drive to photograph a barn that had caught my interest on an earlier trip. I hadn't stopped and photographed it on that earlier occasion because I wanted to shoot it in the dramatic light of morning.
Above are the 35mm snapshots I took at about 7:30 that morning with my old Pentax® K-1000. After looking at the photographs, I thought these references offered a lot of potential for a good painting. I could have started my painting with just these; however, I wanted more drama and more color and didn't want to have to do the working out of possibilities on my canvas. I wanted to do it beforehand so that by the time I was laying paint on the canvas I would be fairly sure of what I wanted as a final product. |
| First I scanned the snapshots on a flatbed scanner and created a composite of them using Adobe Photoshop® 7. While I was in Photoshop®, I removed the distracting highway, telephone pole, road signs and real estate sign using mostly the clone tool, healing brush, and patch tool. I also enhanced the colors a little. Once I had done that, I began to realize that the sky was too boring as you can tell by the next image. |
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