Painters and Visual Artists

It's funny - the first time I saw the Sagrada Familia, which was in a photo shot at a considerable distance, I didn't care for it much at all. Now after I've had a chance to see pictures of the exterior and interior up close I think it's the most beautiful basilica or cathedral ever built, which is saying a lot. Antoni Gaudi has certainly carried on the fine Spanish tradition of building ridiculously ornate cathedrals, which is something the builders of Angkor Wat and those elaborate Indian temples would probably appreciate.

 

The hardest part of doing your own work is not the actual pain of the needle but more like cramps and muscle soreness from holding yourself in that position for hours.

There really is no upside down when it comes to tattooing. If you think about the way you draw a picture on paper you're constantly shifting the paper to different angles and when you do a tattoo a lot of times you'll be moving around too.

That's one fast puppy dog you may need to keep her least or crated until it heals up

 

I was just made aware of this thread and there are some cool paintings in it. I dabble in colorizing old photos, some by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. Would they and other old photos be out of place here? Some of them took weeks to colorize and one took two and a half months.

 

That would absolutely fit this thread! One of the things I had, in fact, been meaning to mention to @FatBack , who is considering if he should start taking more seriously, his eye for photography, is that much can be done with photos, both during their developing, and afterward. They can actually be combined with hand drawn elements, for example. He could almost think of it, as giving his photos, personalized tattoos!

But yes, Steve N, I'm interested in seeing what you came up with. Be forewarned, though, that my general attitude about colorizing black & white images, would lean toward the skeptical. So, provided you don't mind us, perhaps, disagreeing over something...

 

When you say skeptical, do you mean that placing colors on iconic photos means I’m going to hell like Talon once told me? Or do mean the choice of colors or quality of the job?

 

Ok, here’s a Dorothea Lange photo I colorized a while back. A lot of people colorized this photo and I thought I’d take a shot at it.

 

I did not like seeing her do that - hence the training regimen we're going through now - but she's healing up great. We had her on total lockdown and supervision from days 1-7 and then we let her have some limited activity from days 8-10. After that the vet said it was cool for her to start returning to her normal activity level and now you’d never know she had surgery 2 weeks ago. In two more weeks I might start taking her back out in the woods again for long walks and critter hunts.

 

Steve does great work. Not only does he have an excellent eye for color he shows great restraint where others would go over the top, and speaking of over the top:




That was once a very ordinary color photograph I took of my wife (who is a blonde, not a redhead) and a bunch of eagles I noticed above us during a hike up Sharp Top Mountain in Virginia years ago, and then I took the image into Photoshop and blasted color and texture into it. Since I was no longer working strictly within the medium of photography and was now working within the realms of video and computer graphics, I treated the image as I would in those media, which have their own unique qualities and properties. Contrast the garish electronic color in this picture to the subdued color in the Naturalist paintings we’ve been looking at where the artists are dealing in pigments and earth tones, whereas I am working in RGB video light and color. Two completely different media which should be treated completely different.

Know thy media.

And on a personal level, this is typical of the work I've done in color video and computer graphics. I'm BIG into color, and those media have the ability to produce color that paintings and other non-electronic media simply cannot because we are literally working in light. The Impressionists tried to simulate this in their attempts to replicate white light in pigment, but it's an impossible task when you're working in reflective instead of direct light and color. Artists can now do things in these media that the Impressionists and others could only hope to do, but it also brings me back to the comment I made earlier about how it's much more difficult to simulate the properties of white light using earth-toned pigments, as the Naturalists did. When you look at LaThangue's Mushroom Pickers you are looking at a truly exceptional and successful example of how one can pull that off.

 

Talon, thanks for the compliment. Once I figured out how to select things and how to use gradient maps things got easy, but things can also be tedious if there are lots of objects in the picture. So putting color on a rock is easy, what I don't have is creativity which you seem to have in spades. The pic you took of your wife...the way you make it look like it does takes creativity. I never would have thought of that....in fact I wouldn't even know how to do that and I use the same program you use.

I have more pics I can post, the one I posted just happened to be on one of my iPads. But I’m waiting to see Def’s skepticism first, He might not like this sort of stuff and it’s his thread.

 

It is a very natural looking result, you've created-- no one, glancing at it, would have reason to question its authenticity. I commend your attention to detail. I'm assuming you'd needed to outline every area you wanted a particular color, one at a time. From having done just a little bit of practice with the painting technique of glazing, I know that it requires both patience, and the ability to see the finished composition, from the start, in your mind's eye-- which is no common skill.

Speaking for myself, at least, I'd find it helpful, and interesting, to have you explain the technique used to colorize. I am curious, for example, about the variations in some colors-- for instance, the red of the gas pump, versus on the "Pop Kola" sign, to the rear left. I'm guessing that this change in tone was something that your employed technology, took care of automatically, based on the darkness of the original. But if you had gone the extra mile-- or do so, in the future-- of using multiple tones of the same color, that would be very impressive. I'm not just talking about variation for its own sake, but the way you could use it, for effect, as by dulling the areas you wished to recede, and intensifying other areas, to bring them forward, to create a greater illusion of spatiality. I have a similar question about the sharpness of line detail, which is not as pronounced, in some places; this is the doing of the colorization program (or just the original image, not being as sharply focused in those parts of the shot)? Would this technology allow you-- if you wished to, say, slightly change the focal point of some image-- heighten the details of that area, and blur, or at least soften the focus, on areas moving away from that focal point? You explained that this sort of "creative" alteration, is not really your intent, so I am just, as I'd said, curious in my own mind, because these are things I would want to experiment with, if it were me.


Now, to my criticism. The small one, is that the building looks cleaner, & so newer, than I would have imagined. While it might be possible that age could have had a blanching effect, or that sunlight on its face created some of this effect, I am guessing that you may have just wanted to play up the contrast between the structure, and the figures. I note that three of the porch pillars are white, and the one on the left end, is sepia. It's also hard for me to believe that you'd stayed strictly true to the original, and yet not had a greater shadow, beneath the roofed porch-- based on the glare on that roof, it would seem to still be close to mid day. I was going to add something about the more likely, true life imperfections in the complexion of a public use building, especially a gas station, and one with so many loungers, but I feel that would be my getting overly picayune.

Finally, my biggest criticism-- but I will offer, with it, a possible solution. Because there are so many signs on the building, your colorizing of them, cannot help but draw more attention away from the people. But it is the ambling of those placards, across the entire image, which I feel makes these a distraction. If, however, you split this into two images, I think it might be an improvement. Try it, on your screen.

I would suggest that one just focus on the single character, on the left, framed between the gas pump and the post (just to the left of the door frame), which would also frame that side of the image. I would crop away, in that shot, some of both the bottom and top, of the original, as well. Here is where you could try adding depth, by slightly fading those lines where the boards overlap, back by the window, and making things a little more crisp, where the man sits, at the corner of the porch.

That would then, of course, leave the main portion of the picture, for your other image. Can you now print out copies of your image, so that you could see what difference it would make, to divide it? If your printer's colors are not up to your standard, I'm sure that Staples must have color printers.


Believe it or not, all my suggestions are my attempt to not disappoint you, as I'd read another post, in which you said you were awaiting my thoughts. If, though, you had only wanted to make doubly sure that I felt your colorization work, fit the thread-- it is undoubtedly graphic art, so you have my check of approval.

 

Thanks for the feedback, you're much kinder than some of the people on Facebook who rip me to pieces.

The technique I use, after taking a few years to figure out, goes like this: I put a layer of color over the entire picture and then I invert it so the color disappears. Then using a brush I paint color on whatever particular thing I'm colorizing, most pictures have many hundreds or even more than a thousand layers. Once I have color on something I can change the color at will to whatever I want anytime I want, and then there are blending modes to pick from to apply to that color layer. I have no idea how they work, but the blending modes seem to determine how the color layer interacts with the picture, and the modes I most often use are Color, Overlay and Soft Light.

It took me a while, but eventually I figured out how to select certain things rather than using a brush to apply color. There are several ways to select stuff, sometimes its' easy, sometimes it not and takes time to only select something specific with no under or overshoot. When that happens I have to get a brush and fix it.

Regarding the main part of the building, that initially had me stumped because as I was working on this picture I was able to look out my window at my neighbors wood gate and noticed how it had that greenish tint to it. I had no idea how to select or just put color on the parts that needed to be green, so what I eventually came up with is to use a Gradient Map. With a gradient map I can apply several colors to whatever I've selected or want to brush on to the picture. When doing this I can automatically apply one color to the darker parts of the picture and another color to the lighter parts. I can change the colors anytime I want and I can add as many colors as I think I need. This technique is most helpful when doing trees and grass.

The main building was done in three or four different pieces because the same gradient map didn't work for everything. The four posts you mentioned were all done together with a gradient map of three colors. When working on this picture I noticed the same thing you with the pillar on the left and wrote it off as being part of the picture.

Regarding the focal point you mentioned, I'm not really sure what you mean. When you mentioned the sharpness of line detail, are you referring to an object not having color right up to its edge? If so, that would indicate I either was sloppy with the brush or my selection was poor.

About the signs, I just threw a color on them and then kept changing it to see what looked good. While this picture didn't do this, many pictures know exactly what color they want to be and any other color looks bad.

While you mentioned printing, I'm going to go off on a tangent, but it's not exactly pertaining to your point. I have two monitors and the colors are slightly different on each one even though I bought a Spyder color calibration gizmo. Every picture looks slightly different on each monitor. I have a four color printer and when I print this stuff it's different than what I see on either monitor. However, I have 3 iPads, a Kindle, and several Android phones, and the pictures are consistent with all of them. It's frustrating trying to figure out which ones are right or wrong.

What it all comes down to I put a color layer on an object, select the best blend mode for that object, and then start changing the colors until the picture tells me I have the right one.

Check out this picture from Ansel Adams I colorized. With just one or two exceptions, it was all done with gradient maps, a lot of them, every tree has its own set of colors. The interesting thing I accidentally learned when I did this picture is that trees and grass are mostly yellow with a little bit of green. The darker parts of the trees are actually yellow and the lighter parts are green. When I revisited this picture long after I worked on it I started having regrets about the water; is it too blue? Should the reflections of the trees be more vibrant? Should the water have some sort of brown in it? It just doesn't look right to me.

 

Thanks, Steve. One would never know it, but that particular picture is very much a product of the work I've done in video, where I learned to "paint" with the cathode ray tubes in the cameras. The quality of the video equipment I was working with was rather poor - well below professional grade - but I figured out how to deliberately manipulate the deficiencies in a crappy cathode ray tube to produce amazing video color effects. In effect, I got the camera/cathode ray tube to work like a prism, where you have white light coming in and then a multi-colored spectrum going out. I did this by shooting into really hot light - something a videographer would usually never do - and by overexposing the cathode ray tube to light, it would freak out and spit out all kinds of crazy color. I also did this by feeding ordinary video into a digitizer on a computer and then jacking up the white light levels until it started producing color effects that weren't in the original video. It's one of the wonderful and unique things about working in electronic media - you can't do that in any other medium. In a way, I did the same thing with the pic of my wife and eagles on Sharp Top. I plugged an ordinary photo shot during the bleakness of Winter under overcast skies and flat light conditions and figured out how to blast color, texture and contrast into what was a very drab original as far as color and light were concerned. That's an old image I happened to have handy and unfortunately I can't remember all the color tools, effects and filters I used but I do remember being surprised with myself (and the software) because it took me very little time to produce (less than a half hour). But as you know, with experience comes efficiency - you know what tools to reach for and how to use them.

That's my favorite piece I've seen so far - the color's great and I can appreciate the amount of work you had to put into it.

By the way, we still have a few stores down here in Virginia like that where people like to hang out, kill time and shoot the sh*t with people. That's Vintage Americana, and you gotta love the old tobacco and cola signage

"Chesterfields SATISFY"

Classic....

 

Here's the picture, this forum thing wouldn't let me post it in my original response.

 

This is what I mean when I say you’re creative. I have a hard time coming up with ideas, with you they just seem to flow non stop. I can be relentless trying to solve a problem, but coming up with something new and innovative is not my thing.

 

Thanks again, Steve. Part of it's God-given talent and natural curiosity but a lot of it has to do with the fact that I was fortunate to study art at one of the best public art institutions in the country which had exceptional artist-professors who pushed us hard to think and work in creative and innovative ways. Natural ability will only take you so far - if it wasn't for Walter Wright, Myron Helfgott, George Nan and several others who mentored me I would not be the artist I am today.

 

I started playing with photoshop back in 2016 and had no idea what I was doing. I tried watching a few videos but I just can’t sit through them, once I get an idea what a tool does then I have to figure out how can use it. It took me forever to learn that in some of the tools only white can be selected. It was about two years ago when I finally realized there’s a camera raw filter and I still have no idea what a path is or what it does.

If I had to start over I’d take a class because that would have saved me a lot of time. When my sister in law saw some of the stuff I was doing she signed up for a in person class only to have it cancelled due to the virus. She’s a whiz with Light Room, but doesn’t know anything about Photoshop. I tried Lightroom and dropped it because I didn’t want to go through the same learning curve as I did with PS.

You’re fortunate to have good teachers to combine with your talent.

 

Where I think this photo could be improved, would be in the sky. Can you post the b&w, just for comparison. I'd be willing to bet that the blue you'd added, actually makes the sky appear less spacious. I am going to offer some paintings, by a couple of painters who appreciated the nuances, of the sky. One of the, Corot, who I have spoken a little about, earlier, I remember reading that on his death bed, he'd been talking about how he now felt the sky was more golden, than he'd ever appreciated, & captured.



















Note how rosy pink, or vermillion, he makes them. Granted, he has clouds to work with, for reflecting light; but it might be worth considering that the sky only appears blue, to us, because of the combined effect of many different wavelengths of light, scattered about.























Here is the same scene as above, with different coloration.






I will need a second post, since I also want to include another artist Daubigny, who did a lot of scenes on the water, so needed to pay a lot of attention to the sky.




(Continued)

 

I can relate. Most of what I know about Photoshop I learned on my own, and I'll never learn all there is to know about that software.

Extremely fortunate, and here they are:


Walter Wright, Media Arts (Video, Computer Graphics, Sound Engineering)


Myron Helfgott, Painting and Sculpture


George Nan, Photography

All wonderful artists, great teachers and even better human beings.

 

@DEFinning

Here is the picture in Photoshop. Towards to bottom right you will see a blue box, that is the color layer for the sky. The big box on the right shows how easy it is to go through all the colors until you find the right one, the little circle in the upper left is the color I used for the sky.

The way this photo is it would have been a piece of cake to go on the internet, find a sky and insert it where the empty sky is. The thing is, I wanted to keep the picture as true as possible

 

Here's one I did just for chits and grins

 

The guy on top, Walter Wright, I think everyone knows a guy who looks like that and they're usually geniuses.

 

@Steve N

(Continued, from previous; Daubigny-- skies).
























I realize that a lot of these are light colored, and I assume you want something more intense; but I think it is just a matter in the contrast in the solidity of the ground, as opposed to the sky.

























Here is a second rendition of that scene, with a different sky:













I think this can bring up a conversation, between all of us, about both photography, and human vision-- how they differ, and how that can present difficulties in truly "representing" life, through that art. Briefly, though-- just for now-- it seems as if you wanted to produce a brilliant scene, which would have super clarity, no matter what part of of the scene, upon which the viewer's attention alighted. The problem, is that clarity of the other parts of the photo, adjacent to the point of the viewer's focus, of the moment, detract from, by competing with, whatever feature the viewer is examining.

Perhaps you will say that the entire scene is meant to be taken in, all at once. That is something that will always be a hurdle, in trying to depict a large scene-- which of course could not be fully seen, at any given moment-- in a small format, such as a painting or photograph. Even in the smaller image, though, the human eye doesn't work that way.

It is really quite interesting: though we see a composed scene, in front of us, that is the fabrication of our brain, which had held back all the pieces of that scene, as our eyes had darted around, gathering information, from many different angles and focal points. What I have long thought would be a fascinating photographic effort, would be to try to take a large number of photos of the same scene, each with a slight shift from the others, and then try to combine them, like so many overlaid transparencies, lit brightly enough to see them all at once. The first attempt, I would expect, to look a bit of a mess. But maybe this process could be refined, so that the artist, instead of, or in addition to the vinous, deviating outlines, would draw in one line that he was choosing, the same way anyone's brain would do, where the "actual" line was.

But back to your image. Here is an artists' trick, to get better definition (& separation) of forms, which also relates to how our brain works. EDGES of any object are something to which our mind pays special attention. This leads to stronger resolution, more vibrancy, at the edges of things, than anywhere else within the object. So your doing something like this, just at the very top edge of the mountains and treetops, would help in separating them from the sky. But is there any way for you to do such meticulously exact highlighting?


To finish my comments, without needing a third post, I would recommend you do a little more of that creating of space, between the rocks in the foreground, and the outcropping, further back, in roughly the center of your shot. Again, this would mean sharpening the line by making the color slightly bolder, right at the edge (and through this, heightening the resolution of the details). The rock that is further back, you would want to make a little softer, and less bold; IOW, tone it down, slightly. Usually violet is used for this effect, because of the longer wavelengths, of violet light; but this part of the rock may not be so far back, to warrant that. Maybe just a little light, cold grey, would do the trick. Though this might seem like a small part of the image, creating the illusion of space in your landscape, especially because those rocks are at the central base of the sky, will suggest the same recession, of the sky, above.

Lastly, you mentioned, in one of your posts, your questioning your choices for the stream. Actually I see this as related to the problem with your sky, which is a vibrant ultramarine or cobalt blue, which is not being reflected, in your rather sea green stream. This color suggests to me, a lot of algae growth, and so a very slow moving current. Personally, I think this makes he scene feel less cohesive. One would think that in the lower right, where we see all the small rocks, because the water depth becomes more shallow, this would create at least small ripples of clear (or possibly white) water, around these rocks. With that bright sky, I think the stream would look better if it were lighter in color, reflecting more white & blue light from the sky, but also more transparent/crystalline, so we might have some of the color from the stream bed, showing through, at least in that more shallow portion.

Those are my observations. Hopefully some small part, at least at some point in the future, will be of use to you. What sorts of comments, you now have me curious, do those on Facebook leave? I'll leave you, reiterating that I think it would be helpful, if we could compare the black & white images, from which you start, with your colorized versions.

 

You see-- the sky here, recedes better than in the colorized version. I think you made your sky, too dark.

 

Very astute observation on your part, Steve, because Walter is one of the two most brilliant men I've ever met - the other was an engineer who worked on the guidance systems of ballistic missiles. Not only was Walter a great videographer and computer artist (this would include animation) he's the only person I know who can program in Assembly and Machine Code, and he's probably one of only a handful of artists who can do it:

Machine code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_code

Assembly language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language

LOL - I once fantasized about programming in ASM but I never got past C:

C (programming language)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)

In fact, it was Walter who hooked me up with my first job doing computer animation at a communications firm in Richmond, VA, and our biggest client was Ross Perot's old firm Electronic Data Systems.

As for the gentleman with the camera, George Nan, I think you would have done quite well in his Color Photography class, which involved both shooting our own photographs and developing our own prints, and the darkroom work was by far the greatest challenge. It was George who developed my keen eye for color - I'll never forget bringing him a print once and he just glanced at it and said "You're two units off in Magenta". Two freakin' units, and sure enough he was right. After a year of that I could see color as well as George could, and that helped me in so many different ways during my career, especially when dealing with printers working in 4-color process offset lithography. It was also George who beat it into my head to include people in all my work - he found landscapes utterly boring, and I wouldn't dare to bring one into his class. For him, human beings were the ultimate subject matter and anything less didn't cut it.

But the artist-professor who affected me most was Myron Helfgott, because he taught me how to think like an artist. I had him my freshman year, and he made us unlearn everything we learned and thought we knew about art. He basically tore us down and built us back up. That was one of the toughest classes I took because it was highly conceptual and it took me a long time to catch on, but halfway through my second semester everything started to click. It was Myron who got me to think creatively and innovatively, to experiment, take chances, to push the creative envelope in new directions. The suck part was that I looked back on the work I had done the first half of the semester and I was no longer satisfied with it, so I had to go back, throw out months of time and effort and create a whole new body of work for my portfolio presentation at the end of the year, but it was more than worth it.. Myron had one of the toughest jobs at our university - taking a bunch of raw high school talent under his wing and molding them into fine artists - and sometimes I could tell, especially during our first semester, that he was frustrated with our thinking and our work and he wasn't getting through to us, and to this day I've found nothing more satisfying than look on his face after I presented him with my portfolio at the end of my freshman year. He just lit up. He looked at me like "You finally got it!" and I looked back at him like "You finally got through to me!". LOL - We were both so proud of each other, and it was stuff like that made all the hard work, long hours and entire experience special - the process of learning and growing and becoming an artist, and it's a journey that never ends. If you look at the great ones, they're always innovating, always taking their work in new directions, always pushing themselves into new creative frontiers. There is no finish line, and if you think you've reached it you are finished as an artist. You might as well hang up your easel or your camera or your computer and turn into a mushroom. If I have one piece advice for anyone and everyone in the arts and crafts it's just that - keep pushing yourself and your work. Challenge yourself, experiment, take chances, do things you've never done and never even thought of doing before, and have fun with it! Find joy in your work and you'll find joy in yourself.

 

Here are few works from a couple of artists associated with the German Expressionist movement.

First, Oskar Kokoschka, who really knew how to work a canvas:

'

Detail - looks like he dragged a palette knife through the hair and elsewhere....