Times—they are a changing. Digital has replaced film photography for most of our everyday needs. A few years ago there was a variety of film brands and types on the market. Slide film was even available at Wal-Mart. Today you're fortunate if you find film available in a specialty photo store. Due to these developments, many of us have had to resort to mail order for purchasing and processing of our film. Gone are the days of quickly picking up a roll of slide transparency film, shooting your pastel paintings, getting them developed (often within one hour), and mailing them off to exhibitions in time to meet the deadlines. If you read the prospectuses for most exhibitions, they have switched, or are in the process of switching, over to digital entry. Even though a few organizations still require slides and a few accept slides along with digital, the writing is on the wall: Digital is the future.

The transition has not been problem free. There are still bugs to be worked out and with time the process will become more simplified. Organizing the entries, ease of storage, viewing options (TVs, digital monitors, digital projection), all add to its 
convenience. The days of needing a darkened room and a slide projector are nearing an end. Who knows, maybe our old camera equipment will become props for future still-life paintings!

After spending years learning to photograph pastel paintings, struggling to obtain a sharp image that was properly exposed and color-balanced to the lighting, many of us now find ourselves having to adapt to new technology. Learning the functions of the digital camera  and reading the owners manual can ease the transition. No two cameras are identical, making it easy to forget procedures and settings that  are not often used. Even consumer-level cameras are offering many professional features. Most major camera manufacturers have a digital PDF file of the camera manual available online. I keep a copy of these digital manuals on my laptop computer. That way, when traveling, I have the information available without having to pack along a hard copy.

Another valuable item is the old tried and true photographic gray card. This card helps in the evaluation of exposure and the accurate adjustment of “white balance” temperature of light). Its uses will be examined in more depth in next week’s blog.

Invest in a good image-processing program for your computer. Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard, but is very expensive and has a lot of features most artists will never utilize. Photoshop Elements is the stripped-down version of the program. It provides everything most of us require at a fraction of the full versions cost. Familiarize yourself with the general operations of the program. Get advice from other artists as to how they process their digital images. User-friendly instructional books are available and free advice is abundant on the Internet.

In the next blog, I will continue this discussion with some useful tips for digitally photographing pastel paintings.

Every season has its charm: winter is introspection; spring is promise of renewal; summer is energy; and fall is last hurrah. Finding inspiration in these seasons is part of what makes landscape painting so enjoyable. We know that change is inevitable. Our subject matter is never still. As the earth wobbles on its axis, the seasons come and go. We might have our favorite, even one that finds us producing the most work, but fall seems to be the one most often mentioned for its visual stimulation. The transition from greens to warm yellows, oranges, and reds never seems to disappoint. Every region has its personality on display; see what southern Oregon has to offer in the photo at left.

Areas with an abundance of hardwoods will put on the most spectacular of shows: Maple, birch, aspen, alder, elm, cottonwood, and even oak have their special palettes. Bu even the brushes of the desert add their notes of color to make fall one of the most inspiring, if fleeting, times of year.

Due to the juxtaposition of cool and warm, these autumn scenes are often difficult to portray without looking artificial. The unsuspecting landscape painter, whose paintings of winter, spring, and summer work well, often winds up struggling to make a vibrant fall scene look respectable. A suggestion that might make this stimulating time of year a little easier to handle: Choose a dominant color temperature for the painting. Imbue all the color choices with that temperature as a means of unifying what could otherwise be a painting made up of opposing color families. An example would be choosing a warm color temperature and then toning the intense blue sky and green grasses down a bit in chroma (intensity) to better unify it with the bright intense warm tones that dominate the painting. By graying the cooler tones, they will become naturally warmer and better allow the warms to dominate the painting. A cooler temperature would affect the chroma (intensity) of the fall foliage, making it slightly grayed and better unifying it with the intense cool sky and grasses. By choosing one color temperature to be of the highest chromatic intensity, a painting that represents even the most exciting of color variations (like yellow, red, and orange adjacent to blue and green) will harmonize.

Enjoy what fall has to offer; soon winter will be upon you and another inspiration will be taking your hand.

Painting is but an illusion. How we handle the elements within the framework of the painting relate visually to the viewer and communicate our intentions. Learning the strength of these elements is our ongoing job. How edges are manipulated can be one of the strongest tools we have in conveying focus and form. The sculptor creates within the realm of mass, producing bulk and relating form. The painter, on the other hand, works on a flat surface and produces the appearance of form with the visual elements of shape, value, color, and edge. Our pastel surface is flat. We have to produce the magic of making it appear dimensional. Hard, sharper edges produce stronger focus and flatness. Soft, blurred edges produce less attention and more depth of form. Finessing hard and soft edges throughout our paintings can lead to more attention and depth.

The relativity of edges throughout a painting is determined by the artist’s choices. Something may appear very soft in one painting and yet appear hard in another, depending on how the edges are handled comparatively. If an artist chooses to work very sharp edged, then anything slightly blurred will appear very soft. If everything is blurred, anything slightly hard will appear sharp. Generally speaking, creating harder edges near the area of interest, or major focal points, leads the viewer to a specific area and holds their attention, just like focusing our vision on a given area makes it appear sharper. Conversely, softer, fuzzy edges diminish and become less important, which leads to a feeling of bulk due to the offset placement of our eyes. Softer edged objects within our paintings feel as if they could be hugged.

Orchestrating between hard and soft edges becomes a personal style choice. Understanding their visual power provides us the power of the illusion: producing both focus and bulk. Another magician’s trick exposed!


Painting detail: illustrating hard and soft edges within a pastel painting.

Most of us were taught to never use pure black or white in our painting. Our first instructors made a point of explaining that neither really exists in nature. Everything we see has a color bias. What we see is a reflection; it takes the object, light source, and our eyes to become real. Since light is all color, everything has some degree of color associated to it. Even a void, non-reflective black hole has some color bias depending on its setting. It's also important to remember that the pigments we employ in attempting to create the illusion of reality are merely that—pigments. We use them to duplicate what we see; they're not the real phenomenon. Cobalt blue is no more a sky than cadmium yellow is a sunflower.

To avoid dead, unharmonious passages in our paintings, we were encouraged to avoid pure white and black as pigment choices.There are times, though, when white and black can be useful. Just as a wet-medium painter has to rely on white to lighten certain pigments to achieve a lighter value (tint) and black pigments are often employed to darken a pigment (shade) so too must the dry-medium pastelist. In fact most of our pastel sticks have some degree of these added already in order to achieve the value ranges we use. Used wisely, a pure white and black stick of pastel can produce an expanded value range within our work. Since pastel isn't as easy to mix together as wet media, we have to layer to achieve a mixed, or fused, effect. This is where softer pastels will work better. Harder pastel sticks tend to push the pastel around, even scraping the under-layer of pastel, and depositing a minimal amount of pigment. A softer pastel stick will allow for a generous amount of pigment to be deposited, fusing with the previous layer of pastel and producing a mixed appearance. For example, say the bottom of a sky area needs to be lighter, and you have used the lightest blue pastel you have. By lightly pushing a little pure white pastel into the area and not over rubbing but allowing the pigments to fuse, you'll be able to represent the value needed. Conversely, placing black pastel into a dark color until the desired value is achieved can darken an area (See my example above, in which white has been added to the blue and black has been added to violet to alter the colors' values).

So, white and black can be useful for the pastelist and should not be overlooked when setting up a working palette. It seems that sometime we can benefit from a little “black and white” ideology!

As enjoyable and addictive as working on location (en plein air) can be, there are times when we don’t have the luxury of setting up our gear and devoting the needed time to a field painting. In these instances, photography can be a useful tool, providing a reference image that sparks our memory, transporting us back to the scene and  
our initial motivation.

Photography is often given too much importance and blindly copied. We forget that it's an art form in it’s own right and easily manipulated. Lenses create distortion of depth and focus. Value ranges are condensed leading to overly dark shadows and blown out lights. Color is all over the place. With so many things against it, you might wonder why use it at all. The one thing the camera does very effectively is record detail. Focused properly, it's capable of razor-sharp definition. Since it is so capable of recording the most incidental of information within a scene, our attention should be on what it doesn’t handle well. This being: value relationships and color tendencies.

To overcome this challenge, make notes or sketches of these relationships and snap that quick photo to provide detail information that might be needed during the painting process back in the studio. I use a simple formula to photographically record the scenes I don’t have time to paint. I begin by setting the zoom lenses on the camera to as close to human depth perception as possible. For standard digital cameras, this is close to 30mm. On a 35mm film camera, it is 50mm. If your simple pocket camera doesn’t indicate these settings, just bump it up one telephoto notch when the camera is turned on. Most point-and-shoot cameras start at a mild wide-angle setting when initially powered up.  Telephoto settings might be useful for pulling things closer, making them appear bigger, but they greatly distort the depth by closing space. Wide-angle settings provide the ability to accommodate more of a scene, producing a panoramic view, creating more distance between objects, and opening up space.

As useful as these lenses settings might be, it's imperative that we remember the distorted appearance they produce. After framing the scene and taking this first photo, you can zoom to telephoto or back up to wide angle as desired, recording any pertinent information you wish. Relying on the first photo to relate the human perspective as perceived when standing there allows you to place your feet back on the ground, no matter what was done with subsequent photos. It’s the most important reference photograph—helping to transport us mentally back to the location.

The important thing with photography is to remain aware of its limitations. We need to become sensitive to human perception by spending time observing nature. Not a quick glance, but studied quiet time just observing. Through this study, a better relationship can be formed with the photograph as reference material and not the all-powerful god it can become. It's our job to use it, instead of being used by it.