Category Archives: Tools, surfaces and mediums

GrayScaler 1.0

Tools, surfaces and mediums

New Android App For Artists

Explanation

I have almost always painted from photographs and sketches done on-the-spot that were “memorialized” by photos. Thirty years ago, before digital cameras, I actually worked a lot from slides that I viewed through a dissecting (low-power) microscope mounted on top of a makeshift sort-of light-box next to me. This was cumbersome, to say the least.

The advent and perfection of digital photography, plus the availability of tablets to view the photos, has made artists’ lives much easier. Just the benefit of being able to take lots of shots of a scene without worrying about wasting film and the expense of developing that film is monumental.

One of the main attributes of a realistic painting is the proper placement and composition of big, main shapes based on their value, that is, the light and dark areas of a scene. Because our eyes do not perceive the red, green and blue components of a color equally, the lightness or darkness of a color in nature or a photo is often quite difficult to determine. For example, pure red is actually a middle value even though it seems very “bright.” Experts advise to squint at a scene to minimize details and make the “big shapes” of light and dark more visible.

There are a number of “color-picker” app tools that display the not-very-useful-to-artists RGB (red-green-blue) components of a color at any point on an image loaded onto a tablet or phone. This RGB information is useful for computer art, HTML, designing screen layouts, etc., but the apps do not show the gray levels useful for artwork. Another range of tools also available to artists are printed gray-level cards to lay next to areas of a painting that allow the painter to judge gray levels. So, for painters, neither the “color-picker” apps nor the cards are ideal.

To fill this niche void, I have written an Android (only – sorry iPad users, at least for now) app that displays both the standard RGB values along with the gray value of any point in an image. Normally, gray levels are numbered from 1 (black) to 10 (white). The gray levels displayed in this app calculate the value to one decimal place, allowing you to estimate whether the value is slightly lighter or darker than the standard. In addition, GrayScaler will convert a loaded image to either a 5-level grayscale or 10-level grayscale image. Among other benefits, this feature makes the app ideal for analyzing the value relationships in your own paintings – just take a quick shot of the painting, load it into the app, and convert the image to 5 or 10 levels to see whether the big shapes hold together for a good composition!

Screenshots

The first screen of the app when it is first opened.
Showing menu with no image loaded. The menu items are disabled for the operations that require a loaded image.
The center of the red circle approximates the point on the screen that was touched and where the sample pixel is located.
Image converted to 5 levels of gray.
Image converted to 10 levels of gray.

Notes

  • When an image is first loaded it will be sized to fit the screen. As soon as it is touched, it will expand to its full size. This may seem alarming at first, but pinching, zooming and dragging are implemented, so you can adjust the size and position of the image any way you like.
  • As mentioned above, the normal artist gray levels range from 1 to 10. Any gray level displayed as less than 1 in the app can be considered black and any above 9 considered white. This is an old how-many-spaces-between-numbers problem – there are 10 spaces, in our case gray levels, between 0 (black) and 10 (pure white).
  • I am considering adding a “Settings” menu option that will allow sampling an area larger than a single pixel on the screen. For example, a 5 by 5 pixel area. This would make touching the screen less sensitive and provide an ‘average” gray level of a larger area. Right now it is pretty difficult to zero in on a single small detail to get the color and gray level without a lot of poking the screen and trial and error.

Comments are welcome below!


Click on the “Buy Now” button to purchase and download for $2.50

On checkout from Paypal, you will be re-directed to a page with a link to download the Android apk file to install on your phone or tablet. The page also describes how to install the app on your device.

More screenshots may be added…

Watercolor Paper

Tools, surfaces and mediums

Vintage watercolor paper problems

A few years ago, after quite a long layoff from painting, I got the back room in our condo set up as my new studio and took up the brush again. It has felt great getting back my watercolor “chops” (as they say in the music performance business), but a few major, alarming problems became apparent almost immediately.

The first problem was anticipated and was fairly easily remedied but moderately costly. Watercolors in tubes, no matter how tightly capped, dry out over a few years and are almost impossible to rescue. Sometimes the tubes can be cut open and the pigment removed and re-wet, but this is a messy and tiresome process so purchasing new paint was easier.

The second problem was something that I could not have imagined and I am still working on solving.

First, some background: During the mid-80s when I was still represented by a couple of galleries and had some moderate art income, I purchased a couple of hundred sheets of great, handmade French watercolor paper: D’Arches 300 lb. cold-pressed. The D’Arches brand (now just “Arches” for some reason) was and still is one of the leading fine watercolor papers. At the time, in hundred-sheet quantities, a 22″ X 30″ “full-sheet” was about $3.50, making it a great deal then. I still have 75 or more sheets that now retail for $15 to $20 each.

One more piece of background: All good handmade watercolor paper has a substance, usually gelatin, called sizing that is either applied to the surface (external) or part of the liquid in the “slurry” (internal) that eventually dries into a sheet. The sizing controls how hard the paper surface is and how fast water and paint soak in. For example, blotting paper has little or no sizing.

Normally, when I paint a watercolor landscape, I start with the sky by first wetting and soaking the sky area of a fresh sheet of paper with a sponge before applying various blue and gray washes. This “wet-in-wet” technique allows the cloud colors and “blue-sky” areas to have soft edges. To my initial horror, areas of the sheets of my old stock of fine paper behaved like blotting paper, leaving ugly, impossible to fix, dark areas where the color soaked almost all the way through the sheet! It was obvious that the sizing had disappeared from these randomly sized (no pun intended) and positioned spots on the sheet.

As I mentioned above, I am still trying to solve this problem so that I do not have to just throw away a stock of valuable and, under normal circumstances, great paper. I have tried brushing a very diluted mixture of acrylic matte medium and water onto a wet sheet of  paper, but I have yet to get the dilution correct so that the surface is not too resistant to water.

Stay tuned…