Scanning versus Photographing Art

This year I have helped coordinate a group of watercolour artist (the "Wednesday Wanders" to continue painting, together on-line rather than physically en-plein air during our extended lock down. It wasn't the same but it was fun and we have been asked to submit some of our works for publication. I have long suspected that for watercolours at least photogrphy was better, particularly for luminosity of colour in the more delicate watercolour washes.

.VS.  

So this was an opportunity to do a reasonable "authentic"* comparisons. I have a "cheap" oldish HP Photosmart ink-jet printer, with a built in Scanner on top. I assume this is the style most home-based printers will be. It has served me well (mainly to scan sketches for cartooning but also worked for  documents, printed matter etc). It's proved  more than adequate but I don't want to claim its perfect. On the other hand I'm using my older olympus on a Copy Stand I made long ago using an old enlarger base. 

Lifting the lid of the scanner, positioning the painting and starting the appropriate software actually took me two minutes! The scan took a further 35 seconds and a slight delay before it was saved (or a longer delay if I changed the name of the file being saved). changing the painting to a new one was only around a minute and another 25 seconds so a minute round trip. By comparison the copy stand took about 3 minutes to find and attach the camera. However aligning the painting and taking the pictures was less than 5 seconds and I could change over painting and photograph each with that 5 seconds.

* I know you can do a pseudo-test that can prove almost anything on social media. You Tube) is full of half baked and conflicting views so I figure it is important to not add to the confusion. I'll let you check for which capure you like best (I like the photos) but I trust what I have written here is easy to follow and you can test out each step yourself, So please go and do some similar testing convince yourself.

Experimenting with IGTV

 I'm afraid IGTV never really appealed to me. Not sure if it was the vertical format or the type of video maker it was trying to gain access to. was it YouTube for the chronic selfie take who hasn't worked out how to turn the phone through 90 degrees and use the better lens on the back of the phone. Perhaps I'm being a bit cynical!

Anway no time better than now to experiment with the format.

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Man the embed code is longer than the video! 

I took two short clips with my phone. then I used Canva (an on-line design tool) which can handle video and offered a neat way to append the clips together and add some text. I exported it as .mp4 and it seemed fine until I listened to the audio. So I recorded a simple voice-over on the phone. Uploading to Instagram was the real challenge but I eventually discovered it was simple if I did it from my computer via the web connection to Instagram. It didn't take so long and would I be inclined to do it again, Maybe?

Perhaps not as much fun as using mmhmm. Looks like my challenge to other artist continues.

'Make a video of yourself marking your art"

A lockdown diversion - making a video

 As this "7-day" lockdown in Melbourne began (a few weeks ago now) I thought it would be a good idea to try making a video of myself making my art. Fate intervened and I had a series of technology breakdowns so this got postponed. Yet the aim expanded, Trying to find as many ways as possible to create a video showing me making art or perhaps the processes and media I use.

This is the first cab off the rank. Without my camera I looked to the streaming technology we have all become familiar with, video conferencing aka zoom. Now zoom lets you use virtual cameras (software that looks to zoom as if it is a video input, like a webcam). However, a virtual camera can be a lot more dependent on the software itself and what inputs you can access. I have been using manycam for some time and my youtube "quicktips" are all recorded using it. The open-source OBS (Open Broadcaster System) has been hugely popular in the on-line gaming community for some time.

The pandemic and multiple lockdowns have seen the massive expansion of what virtual cameras are capable of doing. I have been enrolled on the beta test of the windows version of a niffy "little" application called mmhmm. It has just been upgraded to its first "official" release. Here is what I recorded using this latest release.

The video of the painting process was recorded as a .mp4 first up straight from my webcamera with mmhhmm in full-screen mode. Whilst the apple version of mmhmm gives you the option of a faster playback, it doesn't allow this on the current windows version. So I resorted to my normal video editor (Corel's Video Studio) to speed up the video to 10x speed. I also added the CCmusic by Bensound "Sunny", and saved the results as a new video again in .mp4 format. Back into mmhmm with a new room (backround) based on a photo of my palette and open sketch book) and I recorded myself speaking whilst displaying the text cards and other "effects" as I was talking, I also ran the newly created painting video within that session and saved the whole as my final video again in .mp4 format. Finally I uploaded this to YouTube. It actually didn't take long and was fun. 

So I'm going to challenge other artists to also "make a video of yourself making your art".