Whistling in the Dark - John Flansburgh & John Linnell (They Might Be Giants)

I got out of bed today and simply started painting. I wanted to catch up on the time I missed this week due to working overtime at my day job. Also, I was trying to finish up two 11x14 paintings I wanted to put up for sale for the ebsq, In the Style of.... art show which opens up at 6pm west coast time. This would mean that I would have have everything completed scanned and online by 9pm, my time. The two paintings Patrick Nagel copies that I plan on contributing I have dubbed Patrick’s #1 Lady and Patrick’s Lady 2.All the paintings I planned on putting up for sale were completed by 7pm that night. I quickly scanned the smaller 9x12 pieces that were not related to show.

Since I figured I had plenty of time and it is a big pain to scan large paintings in little sections then cut and paste them together in Photoshop. I decided instead to photograph the two Nagel copies with a digital camera I got for Christmas. You see I’m the type of person when I get something high tech I like to immediatly try it out without reading the instructions. After doing this I get frustrated and put it away six months later. This is exactly the same process that I took with the scanner I got two years. I figured my 6 month exile from touching the new toy was over. I got out the instruction manual and learned how the camera worked.

At this point I should point out that I’m not a photographer and have never owned a digital camera in my life. By his time it’s around 7:45. I figure I still have plenty of time to shoot the pictures and have them up by 9:00. Besides, how long could it possibly take to photograph paintings? You just aim and click. Boy was I wrong!! It seemed like every picture I took was not up to par. I had to constantly go back and adjust the camera and lighting until everything was just right. I think I took about 200 pictures to try to get my technique down. In the end the pictures were not showing as much detail as I could get with the scanner. The best thing I could think to do was to give in and just do the old cut and paste with my scanner. I did’nt completey finish until after midnight sometime when I listed everything up on eBay. In the future I do plan to use my camera but only for really, really large pieces.