Spent yesterday on small things, including readjusting the colours on some newly scanned paintings.
I used to scan all of my artworks at 300dpi on a Canon LIDE flatbed scanner, which cost me a mere £30, that I had dismantled and modified so that I can place large paintings on top of it. This worked well enough and allowed me to scan large paintings (even the 1.7M Invisible Woman) and stitch the resulting images together very well. This scanner isn't supported beyond Windows XP (ah, the joys of technology), so this ideal arrangement only lasted a few years. I then bought a more expensive Epson, but like most scanners this has banding issues and can't be manually calibrated. This is a problem with all scanners, and it this easily fixable issue ruins the quality of just about every image I've scanned on any scanner. On the Canon, this was only fixed because I bought three and took them to bits to make them 'lab quality' in terms of cleanliness. That gave good results most, but not all, of the time.
Why does any scanner manufacturer make a model that can't be calibrated and inevitably results in banding? I suspect that the reason is so that people buy another scanner every six months.
A high quality, fine art scanner should be easy to make and there is probably a lot of demand for it too. A simple, wide format, wand scanner would probably to the trick. Current wand scanners are very poor quality and seem to be aimed at rapidly scanning documents for phones and tablets. It's one of those ironic twists of technology that my first Logitech hand scanner for Amiga in the 1990s still out-performs most of today's scanners.
Now I don't use scanners at all. I have a DSLR camera rig that allows me to photograph paintings section by section. This has pros and cons. It does make it a little easier, and safer, to 'scan' large paintings. It means that I can change the lens and lighting conditions; but ideally the lighting will always be the same; a fixed, even, bright-white light that will be cast over the image at all times. All scanners also have separate lighting and capturing heads so that the image has a slight 'shadow' of the grain of any canvas, which isn't there on a photographed canvas. The Photoshop stitching process is the same but the colour adjustment often requires a lot more work because this depends on many factors. This needs doing with any scanned image, but my old Canon scanners gave an excellent match instantly (when all of its fancy filters were turned off, leaving a raw output).
Well, some of that adjusting took place yesterday. Spent today working on a behavioural simulation in Visual Basic 2013. Haven't programmed in this before and somewhat amazed to find out how bad it is compared to Visual Basic 6, which is still one of the world's most popular languages despite not being supported or updated by Microsoft in decades.
I've heard today that I've not been selected for the R.B.S.A. portrait prize, which I've entered with a diptych of my 'variations'. Perhaps this was due to the fact that it was a diptych, and perhaps they would, in the judges' banality, accepted a plain, normal, portrait and not anything too creative, because the second image was very 'unportraitlike'.
As I've painted a series, it would be better to show several variations rather than two (well, not even two variations; the original image and one variation), so entering a mere two images anywhere almost defeats the point of this artwork, yet even as a couple they make for a startling display. The fact that the frames had to be fixed together made it technically difficult to enter more here. I'm disappointed that they didn't get in, partly because I've entered this three times and the previous two entries seemed to be well received (indeed, my Self-Portrait with Black Hole was commended, although they sent me the unexpected certificate folded by mail with inadequate postage, so I had to pay the postman at the door!)
It often seems that what I think of my best work is turned away, when earlier and less accomplished work does well. This happened too with the Tiger Moving Nowhere At All, which I developed over the course of a year for the annual competition at The Tabernacle, MOMA Wales in Machynlleth, a truly lovely place. I'd entered that contest twice before, always developing something specifically for it. For this third year I thought I'd push myself only to not even get selected for the show; yet it's still one of my most popular paintings. The staff there were consoling, as they rather liked my painting and agreed that the child-like scribble of a winner was an awful embarrassment too.
We can't step back but push ahead. We know what we want, what we like and what we don't, and why. Having been a judge, I know what a random process it is - sometimes farcical, like at the Association of Animal Artists Exhibition at Castle Park, where I and my fellow team of judges carefully assessed each work over a three hour period, only to have one judge arrive just as we were leaving, run around in 10 minutes and overrule everything we've decided. Such an insult to the judges and the artists! Such are the whims of judges.
Off to the R.B.S.A. this evening for the closing event of the Prize Exhibition.
In other news; am ordering a custom fitted cavalier hat, which is essential for painting Oliver Cromwell. Let us cry 'olé!' to the spirit of Franz Hals!
