Speaking of Art Blog

Some artists call it editing and others call it adjusting.  I call it tweaking.  Whatever it is called, it is a never ending job while I work on a painting or drawing…..until I’m done.  It starts even before I make a single mark on my surface, and it ends when the work is finally behind glass and in a frame.  I’ll use my newest pastel painting, Preening the Patterns, as one example.

Here is the reference photo I started with:

First I cropped the photo using Adobe Photoshop because there was too much railing that detracted from the main point, the preening Mourning dove.

Then I examined the bird closely.  I didn’t like that its eyes were shut.  I also didn’t like that its beak was buried so deeply in its own feathers that you could hardly see it.  So I went searching in my reference photos to see if I could find another pic I took that same day of the same bird in the same lighting, where its eyes were open and its whole beak was showing.  Plus, it had to have its head positioned in a similar orientation.  Not so easy.  Sometimes this last requirement makes the whole project become a non-starter and I have to abandon the project.  But this time I was in luck.  Just seconds after it preened itself it moved over on the railing, faced me, and turned its head to the right.  Success!  So I borrowed its eye and beak from this pose and positioned and turned them so they would fit onto the face of the preening pose, using Adobe Photoshop.  Perfect!  (I make this task sound so easy, don’t I?  It’s not.  It is time consuming and I practiced a LOT before I got the hang of superimposing one thing atop another.  But it really comes in handy sometimes.)

As you can see in this reworked image, I also tweaked the background color.  I tried out a lot of colors, and landed on this one mainly because I wanted to use a color triad overall – red-orange for the dove, blue-violet for the railing, and yellow-green for the background.  So using Photoshop, I tweaked the background color until I was satisfied with its overall look.  I also lightened it up a bit back there.  It was too dark for my liking in the original photo.

The last tiny detail I needed to attend to was the area down by its claw.  In the original reference photo one feather was hanging down and just overlapping with the claw such that it looked like they were touching.  In reality they were not, but the photo was confusing.  So with Photoshop I shortened the feather a bit so that it no longer looked like it was touching the claw.

Next I chose the frame this piece would eventually go into, a burnished gold frame that would bring out the browns of the feathers nicely.  It happened to be an 11x14” frame, so then I needed to resize my image to be the correct height/width format so that it would match proportionally to my frame.  Sometimes this task gets tricky.  For this particular piece, I used Photoshop to stretch the upper background just a little.  Now my photo was finally ready to print and refer to for my painting. 

Whew!  Did that whole process take long?  You betcha.  Sometimes it takes me several hours of work on my computer, but it’s all part of the process of tweaking.  But even while I’m painting, the tweaking continues.  “What intensity do I want to make that blue-violet in the railing?  What color do I use in the shadowed areas of the feathers?  Do I want to include every last detail I see in those ruffled white-ish feathers?  How distinct do I want to make those trees and branches in the background?”  The questions and answers in the form of tweaks go on…..and on…..and on, until finally the piece is done.  One famous artist once said, “Painting is just a continual series of making adjustments.”  Yep, that is exactly what it is.  Seemingly endless tweaks, edits, adjustments, and then suddenly it’s done and time for a frame.  And then it’s time for the best part -- hopefully some endless enjoyment and wonder ensue by art appreciating onlookers.