Extracting a line drawing using Photoshop

Preparing for a short trip away from home, I decided to carry a sketchbook. While selecting the pens I would carry, I tried a couple out on the cover. Very quick. Very loose. and for me Very nice (It must be the Egon Schiele kind of feel that it gave me : ) I had a look at some of his drawings while making this post for a link but it’s not even close to his kind of work but that’s what this reminded me of. Maybe it was the sad expression?? emaciated look? ) but then there was the background of the sketchbook which was coming in the way.

I’m sure there are plenty of ways to do it but I used “how to select a colour” from e-how to get the finished result. At first I selected the blue and cut it out but that led to cutouts of the missing letter across the face.  Undo’s back to the beginning.  I then repeated the colour selection and replaced it with the grey of the background colour using an ink dropper to select it.  A couple of trial and error steps and liberal use of the eraser I was left with the image on the right.  Would’ve been much easier had I brought along the wacom tablet!

Ideally, I’d have liked to retain the texture of the paper and the weight of the lines but that’s another experiment for another day!

Out of the Frame

I have been busier painting these last few weeks than in quite a while.  The first is a secret online project for which I have a deadline of Jan 31st and will be able to blog about only mid Feb.   Decided to also begin work on portraits something that I had been going slow on last year but these really help me jump back in.  I’m thrilled to be painting again but it is still a daily struggle to get myself in to the studio.   I’m hoping that that will change in the coming weeks.

Likeness is eluding me mostly with the fineness of the features of my friend.  I hope that in the end it will resemble her more closely.  I have used her as a subject in earlier sketches and a painting made early last year – Lost in thought.  I’m back to using oils and so each of these is going to take me longer to finish.  I’m looking to slow down a bit and this medium is going to help me do just that.  I will also begin work on portraits of people I do not know as I have much more freedom then to play around with working on getting form over likeness.    I aim to start working on some still life pieces too as soon as i’ve created more space in my studio.

I miss the daily exchange and encouragement with Smita about what we were working on.  Part of an expat existence, leaving or getting left behind.  I’m happy to hear that she is continuing to paint in Delhi despite a full time job and is currently dabbling in soft pastels.

Like in the past, I will be updating the wip’s on this page to track progress and the final image will be posted on Maya.

WIP’s of Out of the Frame – 12″ X 16″  oil on canvas panel

Year end challenge

Happy New Year!   I havent been painting regularly and hence not been blogging either.  I hope to change all that this year.

I’ve known for a while now that I needed another jump start and decided to take a leap by signing up for Karin Jurick’s year end portrait challenge.  Read more about it on her blog.

I didn’t get the likeness I was looking for ( Sorry Andrea! ) but I’m hoping it will help me continue with painting regularly in 2010 : )   One thing that this exercise reinforced is the fact that I definitely need to go slow in the early stages : )  It’s been fun though.  And if you paint too I recommend you sign up for Karin’s regular challenges.

It’s been great fun heading off to Karin’s Different Strokes from Different Folks blog to check out the entries as she was posting them.  A lot of hard work on her part through the year but this challenge required all of that and more right through the holiday season as there were 180 participants!!   Thank you Karin for doing this again.

8″ X 8″ Acrylic on a linen canvas panel.

Tip : Spot the Flaws with Flipped Images

Here’s a tip on using your computer to spot your drawing/painting flaws.  I was too lazy to grab my camera and take photos of two recent drawings that i did and used the webcam and Photo Booth instead.  What i got was the images reversed and what I saw was a whole bunch of flaws glaring back at me   This is another tool that I will use to spot mistakes in future.  I’ve put a the two examples side by side for you to see.  The first in each set is how you would view it and the second the mirror image.

Didn’t want to go around holding paintings in front of my laptop webcam and googled only to be reminded that flipping images is easy on a mac   Use Preview and use the Flip Horizontal command under the Tools Menu and off you go.  The two below are of a portrait that was started recently.

Odosketch

Not sure whether I saw the reference to the Odosketch website on twitter, fb or one of the blogs I visited a few days back.   I surf with at least 15 odd tabs open on my browser and some remain open for days.  Back to the subject, Odosketch is an online sketchpad.  I’ve tried a few in the past which were not as responsive.  With the bandwith available now I’m sure the earlier sites will be snappy too.  I had fun trying this one out.  Used the trackpad to sketch as the wacom wasn’t handy.

Pattern : Illustration Friday

Pattern. Face after face. Follows a pattern, a formula.  Actually it is more like a guideline.  First to learn then to forget. I didn’t get that when I was learning it. How was I supposed to forget? The eyes to be centered from the top of the head to the chin and so on. I’m taking it into account but it’s not such a conscious decision anymore, more a part of the background conversation.   I remember talking to myself while positioning his ears though.

Today, thanks to Ed Terpening, I saw a video demo of  Peggi Kroll-Roberts showing her guidelines for these patterns. It refreshed my memory and I realised that I need to allow for more space below the nose upto the chin .

You can see more videos, read about this workshop and see Ed’s beautiful paintings on his blog.

Work in progress 12″ X 16″ Acrylic on Canvas

Underdogs

Looking forward to indulging myself for a while and going back to experimenting and learning.   I now have a fairly large image bank of photos taken by friends and me.

When I saw the ref for this it brought to mind the image that you see above and must’ve seen before on posters etc..  I too feel sorry for the underdog.  Hope I start doing something about it too and soon.

This is where I’m at so far and wondering how to proceed.  Spent the last few days just looking at it.

In the meantime, the journaling is continuing and I did my first doodle after a long long time. Used the newspaper so that I wouldn’t stress about how it would end up looking and I’ve uploaded it coz that is what this blog is meant for. I’m reading a book too after a long long time. The ref for the doodle is from the book cover.

Looking forward to some changes from my current all day online existence.

Honesty

I’m on week three, day two of the twelve week journaling programme from Julia Cameron’s book, “The Artists Way“.   All kinds of thoughts and ideas are bubbling into my head and spilling over into the notebooks filled with my out of practice, illegible handwriting.  I’m not so sure I’ll be able to decipher them at the end!

Billy Joel’s song Honesty is for the thoughts currently milling about in my head.   I was thinking about honesty as related to what i put on my blog about my work.  Would love to get your opinion and if you dont agree with the two options I’ve given leave me your suggestion under “others” or as a comment.

Doing this exercise for the second time having gained immensely from it the last time – inspite of not following instructions.  This time I’m trying to do it right.  I have to thank my friend, Rajika for introducing me to the book in 2005 and to Julia Cameron for the incredible advice.  Thank you!   And if you havent tried it it’s an exercise well worth going through.  Take the time to do it.  You wont regret it.

A new country

My blog crossed the 1,00,000 hits mark and didn’t even get a mention here from me but I did notice. Life has been hurtling along at an unbelievable pace. It’s been action packed and for the most part hugely enjoyable.  I’m happy that I managed to paint some in the last month.

The nomadic existence continued. We moved from one country to another and exchanged one hotel for another. Knowing that we’d be staying for a month I had sent some 8″ x 8″ linen panels and paints with my husband on an earlier trip. Usually something this small i’d fill up with a face .   For the first one, I resisted my natural urge and painted in a figure. Soon after, very ambitiously, I started painting my largest canvas yet, a 36″ X 48″. The room had a narrow entrance (less that 4′ in width) which was not carpeted, suitable for me to lay down a bunch of newspapers, squeeze in and paint. The only real problem was that I couldn’t step back and needed to prop the painting in front of the TV to see it as a whole. One evening after I’d finishing work on the bigger piece I found the palette had big gobs of paint left in it. I had a great time using it up for the second panel on the right. The bigger piece is going to be a part of an exhibition here in Colombo (yay!) and is worthy of it’s own separate post on Maya.

Two nights ago we moved into our home. The house is in a huge mess and i think it’s going to be a few days before I can pick up those brushes again.

In search of a perfect model

There are a few subjects that I never tire of repeating and one of them is of my husband sleeping.

It all started when I began looking for a model to practise my newly acquired life drawing and painting skills. I needed one who’d be able to hold still for a pose, like the ones we had in college. Since I was just getting the hang of things it seemed wise to also look for someone who was not fussy about the results, available at short notice and on a regular basis. My husband fit the bill perfectly but didn’t share my delight when I told him about my find. All that he had in mind after a hard day at work was to unwind.

Never one to give up easily I tried to catching him unawares when he was watching TV or reading.  He has some sixth sense and would begin to fidget and on being discovered if i asked him to hold the pose for the length of time I needed ( read hours)  he’d complain.   He used to say that he could feel me staring!  I was only trying to be carefully observant.  There are many incomplete sketches as I was too new to incorporate the changes in the pose into my work.

One weekend I had a home assignment.  I need to paint from life.   On discovering that my husband was sleeping I ran and fetched the easel and set it up beside the bed.   There was no time for preliminary sketches or anything like that.  I jumped right in hoping he’d hold the pose for a short while.   And he did.   I liked the way the piece turned out.  I also liked the spontaneity of it all.  Painted in one session as I knew I wouldn’t catch the same pose again.

After that I made several sketches of him sleeping and a digital painting or two too.  After a while we moved cities and I stopped drawing from life relying more on photographs as references for painting.  I found that in photos my models held their poses beautifully for as long as I wanted and at any time of the day or night.  Always in the same clothes and in the same pose upto the nearest mm.   Perfect!

A week ago we were once again living in one room in a hotel.  I took quite a few pictures to use as reference for a series on Ramesh sleeping.   My paints are all packed up and therefore all i could think of was painting.  My trusty wacom was handy.  I quickly uploaded the pics and chose one to do a digital painting with.   Unfinished like a lot of other work that I do but I still like it.