Martha Jane Bradford

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

A Progress Report_White Violets

Value 3 is finished. The modeling is starting to emerge.

I just realized that this image is my present, a plant in my studio, superimposed on my past, a take from "Salt Mist" (2000).

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

How to do a digital drawing_White Violets_A Progress Report

I opened the correctly-sized reference photo in Corel Painter (see the previous post for sizing). The file included the background image as well as the photo. I chose Synthetic Superfine as my paper and then created a new mask in the Channels palette. I drew a silhouette of the violets, stems, and leaves, using the reference photo but omitting some leaves and making the some of the shapes a bit more graceful. The flowers and stems were done using a flat color pen in various sizes and the fuzzy leaves were drawn with charcoal pencil.

White Violets_Mask

Next I created a new layer on the layers palette and used the mask and the Paint Bucket to fill in the silhouette in black. I named this layer Value 0, because the RGB values are all 0.

White Violets_Value 0

Using the Charcoal Pencil brush and a grey color with an RGB of 50, I filled in Value 1 using the mask. Very little of Value 0 was left showing, as the flowers are light image.

White Violets_Value 1

For Value 2 (RGB =100), the drawing process got more complicated. I used Charcoal Brushes in sizes from 5 - 30 pixels, each on its own layer, and began to model the hilites. For the darkest parts of the leaves I made the tone sparse enough to show some Value 1 underneath. For the lightest parts, the tone is solid Value 2.

White Violets_Value 2

I found it helped with the modeling to have separate masks for the leaves, stems, and flowers, so I used the original mask and made those from it.

This all went pretty smoothly except for the day I accidently ticked "Preserve Layer Transparency" on the Layers palette and had a total meltdown trying to figure out why I couldn't draw on any of my layers. Not the first time I have made this error, alas; it is very easy to do by accident.

Another tip: you will see a colored cross in the upper left hand corner of each layer image. This is a registration mark created with its own mask. It comes in very handy if you mistakenly bump a layer with the move tool or want to copy a layer from one file into another.

And a last tip: I save my file once an hour with the time and date like this: White Violets_130129_1056. You are never in danger of overwriting a file because the same minute never comes around twice (scarey thought!) and that way you can backtrack if you mess up the current file or the machine crashes and turns it to gibberish, without losing more than an hour's work. At the end I keep the final file for each value and delete all the intermediates.

To be continued :)

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Printing a digital drawing on canvas: how to size for being varnished, stretched, and framed

A new digital drawing is underway. The subject is a recently-rooted cutting of a white African violet that is bursting into its first bloom set against a background of huge silhouetted trees. Here is a mock up with the reference photo of the violet against the background from my digital drawing "Salt Mist:"

This seems like a good excuse to embark on more frequent and more informational blog posts. The topic of this one is how to size a digital drawing to be printed on canvas, varnished, and framed in a metal-section frame.

The first step is to decide the dimensions of the frame and stretchers that will be used. Both stretchers and metal section frames come sized by the inch, so the image must conform to that procrustean constraint. In this example, the final image will go onto 14 x 21 inch stretchers in a 14 x 21 inch frame.

Once the frame/stretcher dimensions have been established, the frame window must be determined. To find these dimensions, subtract the width of the face of the frame x 2 from both the length and the width of the frame. I use Nielsen Style 22 Anodic Black frames with lightweight stretchers. The face of Style 22 is 5/16ths of an inch, so this nominal 14 x 21 inch frame has a window of 13 9/16 by 20 9/16. That gives me a digital file size of 13.5625 x 20.5625.

Inkjet prints on canvas shrink slightly when varnished. Experience has taught me that the shrinkage will be .0625 on the short dimension and .2500 on the long dimension for this size image so the file size must be increased to 13.6250 x 20.8125. To avoid any chance of the white edge of the image showing inside the frame window, I add .25 inch of digital canvas all around the image. I copy the image four times. The first copy I flip horizontally and move so that the left edge lines up with the right edge of the image. Copy #2 gets flipped horizontally and moved so that the right edge of the copy lines up with the left edge of the image. Copies #3 and 4 get flipped vertically. Move copy #3 so that the top edge lines up with the bottom edge of the image and copy #4, so that the bottom edge lines up with the top of the image. I flatten the image and use the clone stamp to fill in the corners. This gives an unobtrusive margin to go under the frame face in case the canvas stretching is not done to mathematical precision. My final file size is thus 14.1250 x 21.3125. I print this on canvas 17 x 24.5," which leaves enough blank canvas to wrap around the wooden stretchers and staple down.

This is how to determine the file size in inches. The resolution (ppi, pixels per inch) is a whole separate question. I have gotten successful prints ranging anywhere from 16 ppi (the "Big Pixel" series) to 360 ppi. I recommend testing your image at various resolutions until you get the look you like best. People who print photographs often recommend resizing images to 300 - 360 ppi for the final print. I find that this blurs the texture of digital drawings and that they print just fine at any resolution that suits the eye.

I hope this information is useful. If you would like to automatically receive more in the future, you are invited to join my mailing list by going to http://www.marthavista.com/contact.html and clicking on the contact button

Thursday, May 10, 2012

May 2012 Updates

Dark Pool, digital drawing on canvas, 18 x 27 inches, 2012

I am pleased to announce that my digital drawing Hermione was accepted into The Butler Institute of American Art's 76th National Midyear Exhibition, juried by well-known Florida painter, Gregory Strachov. It will be on view in Youngstown OH from June 24 to September August 19. This exhibition showcases the best in realist art every summer. My 2006 solo exhibition of digital drawings persuaded Lou Zona, the director of the Butler, to allow digital art and photographs into the show for the first time in 2008, and my drawing Sheepscot River Trees was awarded First Prize by the juror, artist Don Eddy, and accepted into the museum collection.

Hermione, digital drawing on canvas, 32 x 32, 2010

Sheepscot Village Trees, digital drawing on paper, 30 x 46 inches, 2007

I am in the process of publishing a new digital drawing called Dark Pool (first image at the top), which was accepted into this year's "Community of Artists" show, curated by Executive Director Katherine French. The show opens June 3 and runs till August 5 in Framingham MA. Katherine French was recognized by the New England Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) for curatorial excellence in 2007 and was named Best Curator of Locally Made Art at the 2010 New England Art Awards.

Dark Pool shows a quiet body of water streaked with the reflections of the trees that line both banks. The black-and-white drawing features a strong contrast between sunlight and shadows which gives the drawing a metaphysical aura, and the presence of the near bank in the foreground and the opposite shore in the background are meant to suggest a process of transition. The drawing is printed on canvas and presented stretched and framed, which I have come to favor because the absence of a barrier of glass and mat add immediacy to the viewer's experience of the image. It is part of my Big Pixel series, so of course the pixels are visible and add to the texture.

Two early digital drawings, Meridiem and Quarry Hill Afternoon, will be part of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community show "Environments." This exhibit focuses on works highlighting the built environment in the context of nature and will go live online in May.

Meridiem, digital drawing on paper, 30 x 45 inches, 1999

Quarry Hill Afternoon, digital drawing on paper, 12 x 18 inches, 2006

Fifteen photographs of my virtual immersive art installation "Acquarella: After the Apocalypse," which was on view all of April at Split Screen Art Installation in Second Life, curated by Dividni Shostakovich, will be included in a show in the Detroit Metropolitan Area (specifically Utica, MI) from May 28 through June 24. The Billboard Art Project is a very cool initiative on the part of a nonprofit Virginia organization to take over roadside digital LED billboards and turn them into free public art venues for 24 hours or more. Local and international artists provide a break from everyday advertising with larger-than-life art in glowing colors on an electronic canvas that morphs every 6-10 seconds. In case you are local, this particular billboard is in Utica, facing west and can be seen by traffic traveling east bound on Hall Rd (M-59). The billboard can also be seen from a parking lot shared by Muldoon's Restaurant at 7636 Auburn Road and the Utica Fire and Police Department.

The Billboard Art Project is constantly looking for new artists, so I encourage all artists to check out their site: http://billboardartproject.org

For details about the show I am in, click here: http://billboardartproject.org/cities/detroit.html.

Friday, March 30, 2012

New virtual show: Acquarella: After the Apocalypse Opens at Split Screen

Please follow this link
http://alizaringoldflake.blogspot.com/2012/03/acquarella-after-apocalypse-opens-at.html
for pictures and info about my latest virtual show.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Since I am for some reason not allowed to view my comments on my own blog

I will say TY here to quad, soror, Wizzy, and Nazz. I really appreciate the moral support! and great idea, Wizzy. I will follow up on it.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Digital-Virtual Art Exhibit at the Museum of Science Boston Thrown Under the Bus

I have terminated my internship with the Museum of Science Boston.

In February, after working together for two years on the Digital-Virtual Art Exhibit, the Program Manager of the Cahners Computer Place suddenly told me that he was retiring from the Museum in two weeks. He seemed oddly elated.

I set up an appointment with his boss, Lucy Kirshner, Manager of the Discovery Spaces, and presented the exhibit proposal to her in detail. Her reaction was that she didn't see what digital art had to do with computers. My jaw dropped. Even a quick Google search reveals that most colleges and universities offer degrees in Digital Art and Computer Science. Nevertheless I agreed to do an analysis for her of how my ArtRage interactive, one component of the exhibit, would teach computer STEM. A propos her parting shot that digital art had as much to do with computers as watching a Bruins game on a monitor, a friend commented that possibly she thought I meant finger painting.

I prepared a detailed STEM analysis of my interactive and sent it to her, along with several pages of links to web sites covering digital art and computer STEM. Digital art and STEM, incidentally, go by the acronym STE(A)M in education circles, where it is acknowledged as having the extra advantage of appealing to girls, who are under-represented in the computer field. After many weeks I finally received a reply reiterating her skepticism about digital art and computer science and asking me to fill out an in-house form showing what digital art had to do with Computer STEM. She obviously had not read my materials and gave no evidence of having even looked at my interactive, possibly lacking the software to view it.

Not only did this strike me as a runaround, but it also occurred to me that someone apparently so technologically illiterate would never have the contacts necessary to pursue funding for the project. I put this together with the fact that the Cahners ComputerPlace itself is drastically underfunded (ancient equipment held together with scotch tape and paper clips, outdated software, dim light, '50's decor) and decided that, odd as it may seem, the Museum of Science Boston appears to value neither the ComputerPlace nor visually creative computer literacy. So I terminated my relationship with them.

The strange elation suddenly made sense.

PS The Museum does have a great dinosaur exhibit. And stay tuned - I am retooling the ArtRage tutorial and will offer it on my website.

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Links:
DIGITAL ART: Martha Jane Bradford
Web Site: http://www.marthavista.com/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/
MJB Blog: http://marthajanebradford.blogspot.com/
VIRTUAL ART: Alizarin Goldflake (Metaverse avatar of Martha Jane Bradford)
Atelier Alizarin (Second Life studio): http://slurl.com/secondlife/Lie/222/189/35
Blog: http://alizaringoldflake.blogspot.com/
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alizaringoldflake/
YOUTUBE VIDEOS: http://www.youtube.com/user/AlizarinGoldflake
Anza Borrego Oak:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AlizarinGoldflake#p/u/1/5s_KRMi55v8
Acquarella:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AlizarinGoldflake#p/a/u/0/u-lo6JosN0M
Acquarella:the Fable ( a Chantal Harvey machinima)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX1eFMtjV6U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hhO2Rf88uM (Chinese narration)
Metemspyche's Garden:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AlizarinGoldflake#p/u/2/GfQGuNXWvLo
Requiem for Fukushima Daiichi:
http://youtu.be/2H_ne2XbcNs
Studio Tour:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AlizarinGoldflake#p/u/3/XDjrLmPpopA
The Maze:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AlizarinGoldflake#p/u/4/OEa9rtEiINE
The Mysterious Forest:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AlizarinGoldflake#p/u/5/c6Xv_pAf0Qc
The Winter Bear:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMYSYJNkm1E&list=QL&playnext=1