Post 43: Where am I?

  Well, the pigments, pastels and wax background for "Mugshots" is almost finished:



   The small test I made with the nudes printed on Japanese paper showed the potential problems:

     1. The medium tends to create a certain amount of cloudiness in the dark tones and mute the contrast, so details get lost. I should increase the contrast in the final prints.
     2. When trying to scrape the layer of medium as thin as possible over the image, it is very easy to damage it, especially around the edges, which tend to curl up when fusing. I will have to press the paper down into the wax by warming the background and using a brayer, brush medium over, and burnish the edges down so they are buried deeper in the wax than the center of the image. 

    Now, as far as "Trompe l'Oeil Window" is concerned, I did the baseboard and the window frame(including the inside edge, incorporated the Green Envelope(I had to darken and detail the trompe l'oeil shadow with pastels), the Bug, and the Key on top. There is still some milkiness on the Window Frame, so more wax will need to be scraped off, but carefully, as it is easy to scrape back to the white gesso. I messed up the Nude Black and White Photograph(milkiness and white scrapes, and am considering cutting out a second window and mounting the Photograph behind thin acetate.
   It somehow seems to me now that there are not enough Photograpic Elements to the painting, and that I could add a little complexity. Of course, the Hanging Light Bulb is missing, but still, the Window looks dull. I had a sudden idea, and tried to place some actual objects on the botton ledge of the window, the usual culprits of course, my trademark symbols: a Domino leaning against a Small Red Ball, and a Dice. It works, and brings life to the painting!

   So I believe the pieces are going to end up even more Mixed Media than I thought... The only downside is that the real objects tend to lessen the trompe l'oeil effect of the incorporated photographs, and I may have to somehow subdue them with matte spray.

Post 42: Gonna have to unplug from the Internet to get back to Painting!

    I just noticed it had been almost 2 weeks since my last post. Trump has turned my fairly organized life upside down, and I have done very little since inauguration but bitch, read articles, post on Facebook, answer posts, answer answers to Posts, and rack my brain, first to understand what had happened and why, then understand what was about to happen, then watch it happen like clockwork, then reading everything and everybody in the field of Socio Political Science to try and figure out what to do. I have been obsessed and relentless, and am not sure at all it has done any good at all.
   I need to reclaim my sanity, and get back to work, so except for an hour or 2 a day, starting to morrow, I am pulling the plug on the Internet.
   I have done a little work, but at most a couple hours a day on average. This situation has to change.

      

Post 41; Testing the new scanner

    I got the scanner a couple of days ago, and started testing it with my original nude slides for Mugshots. It comes with both its own Cyberview driver, and with Silverfast8.
   The Cyberview Driver prescan looked pretty good after adjustments, but when I tried a scan at 5000dpi with Dust and Scratch Removal, Grain Reduction, and the Double Scanning HDR like feature, it took an hour, and the result was completely whacky, although actually quite good looking:

   I then tried the Silverfast Driver. First results with manual histogram and curves adjustment, iSRD Dust and Scratch removal (similar to ICE, with an infrared scan) were good, but a bit muddy(right), so I tried cutting out some black, but then lost detail in the deep shadows, although the overall scan looked much better(left).

    It's actually always been the problem with slides with a full range of densities, even wgen I had rgw Nikon scanner.
    I thought I would use the double scan with the HDR like feature, but realized that to do that, I would have to spend $70 to upgrade to Silverfast Plus... Bummer! So I wondered whether I can just do several scans and combine them with Photomatix Pro as I do with photographs. I combined the two scans, and the result showed better shadow detail, better highlight detail, and much less grain:

    In fact, I am quite impressed, and think I won't spend the extra 70 bucks to activate the HDR feature. In fact, I think I might do even better, using 3, may be even 5 scans from light (good detail in the deep shadows) to dark (good detail in the highlights). I tried

Post 40: Printing the Big Black Mugshots

    I want to print the big images on Chinese Mulberry Paper for the final painting, but they are only 1352 x1155 pixels. These nudes were shot and the slides scanned a very long time ago, and even printing at a low 150 dpi, I could only blow them up to about 9"x10":

    I am going to have to find the originals and re scan them at a much higher definition. Which means that, since my Nikon Scanner doesn't work anymore, I have to find a new one. My Epson 3170 Photo, has the capacity to scan slides, but the definition would not be sufficient, and I never found it practical to use for that purpose. 
   I tore down my storage area to locate my original slides of nudes shot many years ago, and have a treasure trove of interesting images to use. So I did some research, and settled for what is generally considered the best mid range dedicated slide scanner, the Pacific Image PrimeFilm XE 35mm Film and Slide Scanner, which "on paper" has a 7200 dpi resolution, a color depth of 48 bits, a dynamic range of 3.9, dust and scratch removal, digital noise reduction, and multiple exposure capability. 

Post 39: Still not sure, just one more study...

    I am concerned that the blues are going to turn too dark to give me sufficient contrast with the solarized images of the model, so I am going to make a small test panel. 
    I received the Smooth Heavy Durt Mulberry Chinese paper I had ordered from amazon. It is about 70 lbs, and the sheets are actually 18" x 27", instead of 22" x 30". It has no deckles either, and comes folded over twice, may be that explains the ridiculously low price for at least 100 sheets... I tried to flatten it under weights and clamps, but got nowhere. Actually, it doesn't really matter, since I am going to wrap it around the 17" x 22" sheet of thin cardboard that came with the Epson paper for  printing, so it doesn't buckle and tear. It is thick enough, lays flat, and is transparent enough that wax should make it clear.
     But first I want to do a test print on each side of the sheet to see which is best, so I cut two 9.5" x 13"  , and taped them to 8.5" x 11' sheets of Epson Matte around the back, marking which side was which. I cut the image down to size in Photoshop, and printed it on both. It turns out the side of the paper that is turned in(I assume the front) gives better detail in the blacks.

    I will do a small Study/Test on a 12" x12" panel primed with the same absorbent ground. First, I paint the edges black, and put a coat of black wax on top.
   A piece of 1/2" tape will leave line between ochres and blues. I worked in the colors with pigments and pastels more or less like the big panel, put a couple of coats of clear medium on, fused them, and scraped back. I then applied the cutout images on tissue, rolled them in with a brayer, covered them with clear medium, and fused. Looks like it's going to be fine:

    Here it is after scraping and polishing:

Post 38: Now the Hard Part: the Abstract Blue Field

     I kept that part for last because to me it is the most difficult, and it is critical to get it right. It is mostly a variation on tones and shades of aquamarine pigments, many shades of blue(I have 3 different Ultramarine Blues), with purple in the darker areas. Actually, I mixed four very dark shades of blue, green, violet, and purple using transparent Ivory Black pigment. I almost never use "plain" black, simply because there is not such a thing in nature. Tint, reflections, stains, light itself create a multitude of blacks within what we call "Black". Never assume Black is just Black, and never use opaque blacks. Ivory Black is the only one I ever use, be it oils, watercolor, or pastels.

Post 37: Getting Medium on "Mugshots" Lower Field

    I am always amazed at the time it takes to do the medium coat, not to brush it on, but to make it fairly smooth and thin so the colors glow. I had a hard time today with this one: may be trying to make it too thin, I kept scraping down to the white gesso, cussing myself every time, and had to make a lot of "patches".
    Before I finish the Upper Blue Field, I want to think about it, and print most of the images, so I raised the painting and clamped it to the table":

     As with the previous painting, the mockup was only a small image, so I have to first finalize the images that I will use, and find them large enough to print at 300 DPI's. In the process, I end up making some changes to the original idea. I looked for images of old slates, both from police departments and schools, and found one I liked a lot:

      I also decided to look for something better than the old Dollar Bill to tape to the "wall", something more meaninfulwithin the painting. I looked at a lot of old mugshots. There is a great collection on the Internet of Australian mugshots from the teens and 20's, such as this great one:

    I also found a high quality "Test Mugshot" of the inventor of the mugshot, famous French forensic precursor and theorist Alphonse Bertillon. He was the inspiration for a lot of Sherlock Holmes investigative "coup de force":

    I started thinking of taping several mugshots to the wall, and he belongs there , but I needed more meaninful shots. The piece is about the decriminalisation of drugs, which I favor, and the overcrowding of prisons with minor offencers (courtesy of the 3 times you are out Reagan laws) that should never have been locked up in the first place...
    I found a great one of a yound David Bowie busted for possession of Marijuana in 1976:

   Then, with the recent John Lewis vs Donald Trump dispute in the news, a mugshot of him from a 1962 arrest in Nashville re appeared: