Saturday, January 30, 2021

Lab Book #22: Hokusai's Turtle


After a bit of fiddling with the lighting and camera setting I finally got a decent shot of this painting which I completed a few days ago. For the purpose of teaching online I obtained some small studio lights, which also turn out to be useful for photographing artwork. I set the white light to maximum and yellow light to minimum, and used an indoor exposure setting (+1) on the camera. With those settings I just needed to tweak it a bit with Image J which is akin to photoshop. It is still better to take pictures in a full summer sun light, but that is a little ways off right now. 

Lab Book #22 contains my laboratory and meeting notes from 2019-2020, including a plethora of doodles. The last one was also named after a Japanese artist I called it "I am Utamaro". This one is named after the great illustrator Hokusai who is best known for his "Under the Great Wave" print, but he also illustrated dozens of books including manga books and created thousands of prints. A manga book contains all sorts of illustrations of everyday life objects. He was known to draw turtles swimming, so I included one in the river near the bridge. I used some of his technique to create the waves and swirling water on the left. One sketch was a chipmunk on the back balconey with a peanut, you may see it in the middle. There is a lemon sunset theme, seen hidden on the horizon, and with the happy faces in the submarine-structure at the bottom. 

Lab Book #22 Hokusai's Turtle, 10 x 15" cold press, watercolour, January 2021 (No. 1346b)

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