New Camera Is Sweet

I have been playing with this new camera. It is pretty nice for the cost. It is at least twice as powerful as the old camera, which I have been bitching about for years, and has a built-in rechargeable battery. It does not "curve" the edges of my paintings when I shoot them, which is great.

Now I need to find an affordable way to get better studio lighting that will reduce glare. I used some old t-shirts to cover the lights for this photo, which helps, but reduces the light quite a bit.

The battery life seems to be quite long and is designed to be able to recharge through the USB cord, so I can both charge and download images.

This camera takes nice movies as well, which will be fun to play with as well.

Maybe some film clips to add to the blog?

This 4' x 4' painting of the waterfront, "Beneath the Broadway Bridge" is still for sale, by the way.

New Easel

I have been wanting to make an easel that can handle large paintings.

For a few bucks, at the Rebuilding Center, I was able to fabricate this thing.

Now, I was hoping to build in more adjustable parts, but I could not get everything to work.

The lower shelf has wooden brackets that connect to the main verticals (2x4's). These brackets were supposed to have holes drilled in them which were going to correspond to holes in the verticals, but that was easier said than done. For now, the shelf is "pinned" to the vertical members with screws. On a large painting, it is unlikely that I will be wanting to move it up and down much. It only takes a few minutes to reset the screws anyway.

If this works out, maybe I will build a more refined easel for this purpose.

In any case, I can now make paintings up to 80" tall if I want.

The photo was taken with my new camera, a Nikon Coolpix S3100. I sold a painting and invested a little in this new camera and am already enjoying the quality of the photos.

New York Bridge

This project has been a challenge. It has taken me longer to complete this due to summer vacations, day job and being lazy.

I am finally finished with the Manhattan bridge painting and am looking forward to getting it out of the house.

This detail from the painting shows a yellow school bus, which turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the painting.

Here is a detail of the bridge.

I painted the vertical cables last using a straight edge. I don't usually use a straight edge while I am painting, but since these needed to be relatively straight and I no longer had the under painting to depend on, I opted to paint the lines on top. I also went back in and added back in lines to accentuate the edges against the blue sky.

There is quite a bit going on in this painting and I have learned some things about doing street scenes.

The amount of layout required to get the perspective right was a bit overwhelming and I stressed about keeping things right.

I was pulling my hair out with the bicyclist and realized that I had the rear wheel too high, which made it look very odd. A quick repainting of this area did the trick.