Lesson 1
In this regard I must say, without apology, that in my atelier, as well as all the usual painting equipment, I have a scanner, computer and large format epson 7600 printer that is capable of printing 75year lightfast pigments on canvas.
The scanner is a common Cannon LCD (diode) scanner that I cut apart with a hacksaw and re-assembled to allow me to scan paintings of any size and to reassemble them in 'photoshop' without any discernable joining. The scanner is set up on a large grid table, face down has been used to scan 50"x80" paintings with sizes of over 500mg bytes.
Now the good part - should I wish I can print an exact copy of my original then, using my oil paints, treat the canvas inkjet print as a primatura, and begin to paint over it. The final result can be varnished and protected as you would any other oil painting. This again can be scanned...
Of course this allows me to create an endless stream of variations on any of my originals and hence poses the question: What exactly is an 'original'?
I shall leave this for others to decide but let me only say that to this point I am perfectly happy with the integrity of all the processes upon which the final work is constructed.
Now I shall demonstrate some of the processes with my 'Bounty' painting 'Portsmouth 1792', above. The image above is a JPG compressed image made for the purposes of this lesson. The original oil painting was scanned at 360 dots per inch (DPI) in 15 parts. This was joined and color corrected and flattened in Photoshop giving me a 250+ megabyte psd (photoshop) file. The JPEG above was saved from this while the PSD file is the one I manipulated.
Within photoshop I selected a portion of the original and copied and pasted it on to my work area.
Next I 'flipped' it over for the reverse and joined it as close as possible - lining up the particular features that were important for the landscape generally.
Some further adjustments were needed and some of the details obviously need to be isolated and reformed.
Here I have removed the ship No 1 which will become the major and closest ship. It also need to be tilted a little so the masts line up properly. This is done separately and then the ship replaced into the painting- see below.
