Bob Cairone’s Art Blog

This post is about photographing your artwork for good quality reproduction. There are two ways to do this – Pay someone to do it for you, or Do it yourself. I always opt for the latter when possible, and after some experimentation have finally worked out a method that does the trick for me. For the benefit of others who are thinking of doing this, or for those who have struggled with this task, here is my approach.

First, some background. For a good reproduction, the minimum resolution is 300 dpi. Now, I have a decent camera (Nikon D5200), and it shoots at 4000 x 6000 pixels. This is typical for a good camera. At 300 dpi, that means I can only shoot artwork that is about 13 inches by 20 inches. If the proportions are different, I can’t make full use of the camera’s sensor. So while this is adequate for a 9×12 canvas, it’s not quite good enough for 14×18 or 16×20, let alone 24×36.

My solution involves taking a mosaic of close up images of my canvas, then combining these shots into a composite using Adobe Photoshop Elements. Elements is not expensive (or Photoshop is available on a subscription basis too), and does a great job of stitching the photos together, using the Panorama feature. Here are the details:

First set up the canvas level and plumb on an easel. To avoid glare, I face the front of the canvas away from a window, so only diffuse light illuminates it. Plus I use a polarizing filter on the camera. If the light level isn’t high, the camera will just take a longer exposure, and you can also increase the ISO a bit. The camera should be set on a tripod square to the canvas, as close to perpendicular as you can get it. I just eyeball this. I also use a remote shutter release on the camera so it doesn’t shake during the exposure. Once set, the focus doesn’t have to be adjusted between shots.

Then I start shooting. For a 24×36 canvas, I take four shots along the bottom of the canvas, sliding it horizontally on the easel between shots. You want a fair bit of overlap between shots. Then I lower the painting about ten inches, and take another four four shots across the middle of the painting. I lower it one more time to take a strip of four shots across the top.

Now it’s time to stitch everything together in post-processing. Prepare the images by cropping out any background, so that none of the easel or room shows up in the image. Otherwise this extra background will confuse the stitching process. Do this for all the edge shots. It took me awhile to figure this out. Then save all the cropped images. Go into Element’s Enhance menu, and select Photomerge, Photomerge Panorama. Select the images to be included in the merge, and click OK. Elements will figure out where the pictures should go in the right order. It takes a few moments to accomplish this task, which is really complicated mathematically, but hey, that’s what computers do. After the merge, under the Layers menu, Flatten the image.

At this point the image may not be perfectly square. I go to Image, Transform, Free Transform and stretch the corners until they’re square. And that’s it. Do any other post processing you need, then save the file as a jpeg and take it to your printer for reproduction.

It gets easier with a bit of practice. Especially when working things out, little details kept messing me up. I ended up clamping blocks under the easel’s lower support so it didn’t tilt when the canvas was off center, and I used shims to keep the support bar from throwing shadows across the top edge. I hung my camera bag as a weight under the tripod for extra stability. And I had my wife help by telling me when the canvas was slid over enough so I didn’t have to keep walking back and forth, but it can be done as a single person task.

I hope this helps save you time and money.

As 2016 draws to a close, and the prospects for reflecting back on past events is too dismal to consider, it’s time to look ahead to 2017. After preparing for a year, it’s time for me to start entering shows and art fairs. Living here in greater Chicagoland, there’s no lack of opportunities. In fact, there is a local company that specializes in setting up and running art fairs – Amdur Productions. They run 31 events, though not all are suitable for me as a painter, especially as this is my first time showing. Besides Amdur, Joe and Kathleen Isacson of xculturearts.com run a few shows, and I plan on being in two of them (already juried in for their Affair of the Arts show in Spring Grove in March). Additionally, there are two independent fairs I plan on submitting to – Art at the Dole run by the Lakeside Legacy Foundation in Crystal Lake, and Art in the Barn in Barrington. All together I hope to participate in eight shows throughout the year.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time. It is frankly a bit scary. I am not a natural sales person at all. I’d much prefer if my art spoke for itself at some high end gallery in the big city, but that’s not going to happen all by itself. Before it does, there’s a lot of preparation that has to be done. One obvious preliminary for outdoor shows is the purchase of a tent, and for indoor shows, some kind of portable walls are needed. For these I’ve already purchased metal grid panels from ULine.com, four wall sections of 2′ x 7′, and a freestanding triangular tower 2′ x 6.5′ high. They are simple enough to assemble, and broken down each piece is light enough to carry easily, but it will be 7 trips to the car to get them all inside. However, they will show a good amount of art.

A tent is another matter. I’m looking at a TrimLine canopy tent, a solid standard at art shows. With all the accoutrements I’m interested in, like mesh walls for hanging artwork on directly, I expect to spend about two grand. This is a substantial outlay of capitol, and I can only justify it by hoping I can sell enough artwork to pay it back. That’s a risky proposition. In addition, between jury fees and space fees, I’ll be spending more than for the tent and walls combined. So there is significant risk in this venture. But it’s a necessity in the attempt to fufil my dream.

 

Last weekend, I attended the Evanston Art Show here in NE Illinois. At about 100 artist’s showing, it was a mid-sized fair. A few booths were closed up due to the weather, which wasn’t bad on Sunday but was moderately rainy Saturday. I actually wanted to go Saturday to see how the vendors dealt with the weather, but circumstances conspired against me. I did see that many booths were closed on the west side and opened opposite, with a few still having artwork under the tarp. Everything seemed well handled.

At a rough guess, painting was well represented at about a quarter of the booths. Jewelry and photography each had as many, with the final quarter filled in by everything else. The average quality was good with a few artists being very good. Personally, my tastes are fairly narrow, but I can recognize quality in a work even if it doesn’t appeal to me.

One thing I do not respect are “enhanced photographs” being handed off as paintings. If the substrate is a printed photo or some other artwork, slopping on some paint does not make it a painted work of art. It denigrates the art of photography and besmirches the art of painting.

One thing I do now want this blog to be is a “typical artist blog” where each post is “this is my latest painting” and “I love how the reds pop out of the green …” Though this blog will often be about my art, I hope it will also be about a larger perspective.

Today I would like to write about how an artist knows a painting is finished. This question has been on my mind because, indeed, I am about to finish a painting. At least, I think so. I am a realist painter, but I don’t strive to emulate photographs. I don’t work trompe l’oiel, where it’s hard to tell the image before you from the actual thing in situ. Nor am I a photo-realist or hyper-realist; the current printing technology allows photographers to fill that role. I make paintings that look like paintings of objects. It’s a bit of a fine line to walk, but that’s the dance that I do.

So how do I know when a painting is finished? At some point it becomes obvious that it is almost finished. All the different components have been completed, underpainted and glazed as needed, and to a consistent degree. The picture stops being a collection of parts and becomes an connected whole. Are the connections right? Are the colors balanced? Are any adjustments in the fall of light needed? Should more details be added to one part or another? This is a fussy stage, where small nuances are adjusted here and there if not everywhere.

After each adjustment, I look at the painting for a good while, looking for anything that could or should be done. Then I ask if the change will really improve the painting or not. After making the change, I have to re-evaluate and ask if it is really better. If the answer is no, then I have to ask if that’s because my painting skills need improvement, or because the painting was as good before the change as after.

Then I put the painting aside for a day or two where I don’t look at it. A final inspection with a fresh eye, and if I still think it’s done it gets signed. Once signed, a painting is inviolate.

 

Today I went as a spectator to Art in the Barn in Barrington, IL, one of the larger art fairs we have in the area with over 175 artists showing.  Next year I will be submitting my entry for participation. But this year I went looking for different things. Besides the art, I wanted to see how the booths were set up, how people organized their things inside and behind their tents. How did solid panel walls work compared to mesh walls for hanging. What about lighting, especially in the indoor areas?  I wanted to see how people set up tables to hold guest books and business cards or flyers. And of course I wanted to see if people were buying or just looking like I was.

The day’s weather started out overcast and drizzling, clearing very gradually. Though the exhibitors were probably nervous at the start, it turned out to be a good weekend for a fair.

It was clear that the largest single category was Jewelry, at 37 artists.  By comparison Painting, a combination of Oil, Acrylic, Watercolor, and Pastels, totaled 43 artists. Ceramics, Fiber, Wood, Sculpture, etc rounded out the other half of the show, and of course Photography was well represented at 22 artists.

I wonder if the Art in the Barn organizers track purchases by category. It would be interesting to know if people are buying jewelry or paintings. Small, low priced trinkets or major works of art? Originals or reproductions? Though I’m sure to learn soon what the numbers are for my own works, it would be interesting to see if there are general trends. If I can find out I’ll write about what I learn here.

Hello, world! This is my first blog post, now that the technical issues with attaching it to my site are worked out. I’ll be blogging about art in general, with a particular focus on the realistic oil painting I do. But I hope to share about the topic of the moment, be that art appreciation, technique, business, or just about life in the studio.