I didn’t get a whole lot of response back about adding an additional day to my blog focused mainly on my art, so today I am going to start. This past week I watched a tutorial from Emily Olsen Art about painting Icicles. I really don’t like painting winter scenes in the winter, don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because I’m ready for summer, or I’m always freezing in the winter. But this tutorial intrigued me, so I decided to watch her video and see what I thought. I loved the technique, so I went in search of icicle reference photos. I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, but I knew I wanted a brighter background than what she had painted. I found several sunset type backgrounds that I liked and decided to kind of combine, as well as use my imagination. When I was finished, I showed my daughter who is currently serving a mission in New Mexico. She loved the painting and thought it was the marshy swamp outside our living room window. I decided that was the best compliment of all, although I thought I had come up with the idea on my own, I guess what I look at daily stayed in my mind just waiting for a painting like this to express itself.
During Covid I decided to learn how to digitize my own photos. My husband had purchased a really nice camera that I decided to try and use. It worked great. There is quite the learning curve to digitize art as compared to photographs because there aren’t presets for digitizing art, and the colors really do make a huge difference to get it to match the original piece of art. But, through a lot of experimentation I am learning how to do a better and better job. Plus, it saves me a lot of money. That was the expensive part of getting my art printed.
I also have a fantastic new printer as well, that prints archival prints. The ink is not an inkjet type ink, but a pigmented ink. If taken care of, a print from a pigmented ink printer will last 300 years or more, which I am learning is the standard for high quality art prints. I love this printer. It has to be used regularly so the heads don’t get plugged, but so far, I haven’t had an issue with that! Today I printed the prints for my icicles. I am amazed at how good the quality is, but also amazed at how much the paper affects the clarity of the final print. I am learning why people like a high gloss finish on photos, as the pictures pop off the page on the gloss paper and have a duller look to them on the matte finish art papers.
The lighting in my basement is very yellow, so these aren’t the best pictures, it’s also from my phone, which doesn’t have the best camera. But even in these pictures you can see the difference. The picture on the left was printed on a matte finish cardstock weight paper. The picture on the right was printed on a glossy photo paper. While both pictures look nice, I like the crispness of the one on the right better than the one on the left.
Well, that’s what I have been working on this week. I would love to know what you are doing to be creative in your world through a picture comment or email.
Stephanie Richey Art 