Painting on a conveyer belt.

Some time ago I started a painting project, where I see to parallel paint about 30 pictures. The original idea of Georg Kleber even proposes to paint 30 pictures in 3 days. After I've now completed half of it, I dare say I am not the type of painter for this. I feel as if I must work on an assembly line. First I already needed two weeks and after any step I felt confused by not getting all of what I've created, even worse I could not achieve the quality I feel obliged to achieve. In addition I felt like switching channels and looking shortly what is on, restless, never finding any peace by deepen anything in a painting. I also often got sick of the themes (for each step one theme), first they were elephants, then colourful round forms. Now I am sure I will not paint elephants any more and I may turn to rather paint in black and white or with brownish and greyish colors.

Still, I've achieved some beautiful results, and I will go on. The next step may be people drawn with pastels and the last step is to just finish any painting which is still in need of further treatment.

These paintings are finished, but 18 more are yet to complete

Freed Painting, ein Album auf Flickr

Present state of my Freed Painting Project.
(last state)































 

Just Three Colors for Any Hue or Yellow from Green and Red

This essay which compares subtractive and additive mixing of colors I wrote as an introduction assignment of an art online course.

This is a color wheel painted with oil paint. I used the three colors on the bottom of the painting to mix all the colors you can see. Now compare to a color wheel I have created while using light.

 

Note that the light colors are generally clearer. Note also that some of these colors are difficult to achieve with paint, for example the cyan blue just below the west direction. It is not for nothing that some artists decide to make artwork while using light, which gives the work something non-material.

I achieved this creation in Gimp an open source image editing software. When selecting a tool which uses color you can determine the color you need. You can do this by adjusting the values for the three color red, green and blue (RGB). For any color you can use values from 0 to 255. To mix yellow you need the highest values from green and red.

 

While watching the technique videos I realized I am still not tired being occupied with the color wheel. I loved watching the video where Anna Divinsky showed how to blend any hue from just three colors. I bought three oil paintings and tried myself.

An additional motivation for this post is that I am not only interested in traditional artwork but also in digital artwork. I remembered that there are two different ways of blending colors, the subtractive mixing of colors with paint and the additive mixing of color with light. The most intriguing fact for me was that when using light you can mix yellow from green and blue.

This also presents part of my past, where as a young woman I decided to become an engineer of physical techniques. We learned a lot about light and also about chemistry which is paint at its roots. These days I rarely combine artwork with my technical knowledge, but I thought to introduce myself this might be O.K.

Yet, is this really artwork?

Yes, it is and I hope you got the message right, which is artwork must not be extremely original like many people think, it can be just an interesting presentation of the color wheel.

I am really glad that no one can give me any grade for this claim :)



33 Lovley Elephants

Look here for the first part of a painting project I'm just working on.
I've now finished the first step and have thought out what to do next, which is drawing colored water painting lines right over the previous drawing. My motive will be colorful balls or at least round forms. I will take out the drawings with the light blue border from this. They are finished except from some stresses I'll add.

 

 

During drawing the elephants I sometimes thought about elephants in the circus. I thought it must look nice when I add to the drawings something colorful and why not balls or balloons. Still the aim is not depicting anything representational but to find new and interesting shapes, something that can not be named, but felt. For this it is a good start having an anchor in real world objects, otherwise there's a danger to get lost in the infinity of possible shapes.

The Risk of Being a Constructor

There once was a constructor of bridges, who constructed a bridge (Herrenbrücke) which was meant to connect the former commercial center Lübeck with a harbour to the Baltic Sea. It was built (opened 1964), but caused difficulties from the beginning of its existence. They had to open it for relatively small vessels or ships nearly hit the bridge posts, which weren't suitable placed. Even more bad they often could not shut the bridge out of mechanical difficulties, which was causing long waits. It is said the designer of the bridge has jumped down of it, but there is no prove, that this really has happened.
A decade ago they replaced  the bridge by a tunnel (2005) and the bridge has been torn down. Bad is that now it has become more difficult to go by bike from Lübeck to the Baltic Sea. You have to take a bus through the tunnel.

For this animated gif  I've the first time drawn with gimp instead of with the good old pencil, just to see how it is. It's interesting and if you anyway make a digital work out of it the quality of the stroke is good enough. It is just far more complicated. It might be easier to draw with a pencil and to scan the drawing.
Anyway, I took a photo as a background, which I've taken recently. It actually doesn't show the Herrenbrücke but a bridge in Berlin where I live now. I combined this background with my digital drawings and added speech bubbles, which are meant to shortly tell a dramatic story.

Freed Painting I

I've started to paint about 30 paintings in one, which is an idea of the artist and teacher Georg Kleber:
They will be painted in about 3 steps, each step with a different material, motive and technique. I'll draw and paint on different groundings (e.g. canvas, watercolor paper, newspaper, construction paper, each DIN A5).
I started with using a ballpoint pen and fast sketching elephants.

 

 

 

I don't know why, but I love elephants. For me they are symbols of protection and maybe heroism. For them I sometimes go to the zoo, for it is hard to find any elsewhere nearby. Maybe one day I'll travel to Africa, because I've heard some elephants are living there. Or I'll travel to India and may ride on an elephant. 

Deep Sea Touched

I am rather interested in any kind of animation. I like most abstract and experimental animation. I am not very skilled at creating animations, but I like sharing my attempts which are anyway influenced by the years I'm already doing artwork.

Deep Sea Touched is a simple chalkboard animation where a drop of water falls into the deep sea.

Chalkboard animation means there is something drawn on the board and there is taken a photograph. Then the next drawing is added and the earlier drawing is wiped of. This is repeated until the animation is done.
I used my tripod and a camera to take the single images and in the editing software Gimp combined them to this animated gif.

Yellow Submarine

3D modelling and animation is rather interesting to me. I've already learned a lot about the 3D tool Blender, but mostly created after tutorials, which makes it not unique enough to present it as personal artwork. Then again I have also personal 3D creations, which but are quite simple. 3D needs a lot of knowledge of the tool until you are able to deliver convincing 3D design. Still, I want to post sometimes something when I think it might be interesting to others, too.

I start with a work after a tutorial, which resulted in an animated gif of a yellow submarine.

Click here for the tutorial.

I went through the tutorial, but the result seemed too mechanical and like a plastic model. I've already changed the form and colors after my taste and ability, but in addition I've applied a posterize filter in a video editing software to make it look better designed. I saved the work as single images and in Gimp created the animated gif.

I like the gif because it looks like a mysterious story about a long journey with a peaceful submarine.

My camera has its own ways. - Part I

My newest idea is to improve my photography skills. This is the reason I 've searched the Internet for advice. I found a page appropriate to my level of knowledge.

Enchanted

To try out aperture priority mode (P with the Nikon 5100) I've chosen to take photographs of flowers.
I used different aperture settings to achieve the effect of a blurred background while the flower is in proper focus, which worked best with a photograph of a buttercup blossom, because the background was far enough.

Mighty Buttercup



F/5.3, 1/200 sec, ISO-400

 

 

A second picture shows a pink tulip. Here the background is also blurred, but less. An additional effect here is that my camera was slightly tilted, so that corresponding to this the blurring distributes.

 

 

 Floating Flower



F/5.3, 1/250 sec, ISO-400

 

In a third photo, which is a photo of daisies in a meadow, the effect is not so distinguishable, but it is interesting to see that background and foreground is blurred and just the middle ground is in focus.

 

 

Daisy Wide Open

F/8, 1/100 sec, ISO-100

 

 

Petrified



Next I've experimented with shutter speed priority (S with the Nikon 5100). I took two photographs of running tap water with different shutter speeds. The effect is that with low shutter speed the running water is blurred and with a high speed it appears frozen.
I had to set the ISO value rather high, which is the reason the frozen version with a shutter speed of 1/1600 became rather dark. I had to lighten it up with the photo editing software ViewNx2.

Blurred F/6.3, 1/60, ISO-1600	Frozen F/4.8, 1/1600, ISO-1600

I will soon add more of the ways of my camera.