Working on Marcy Avenue, Brooklyn using my home-brew flexible iPad mount
As I continue to work on large, detailed paintings of complex scenes, deep spaces and people in motion, I've been also working on finding ways to aid the process. At first I'd print out high resolution digital ink-jet copies and use a magnifying loupe to examine a detail more closely. It didn't take long before I was zooming in on sections on the computer and using software to crop and re-touch details to optimize them for the inherent distorions of color balance, contrast and brightness before printing dozens of details for each painting.
I'd clip each detail to my hand palette and work until I was "out of the frame" for that printed detail, and then have to move on to the next one I had ready, or stop the flow of painting to go through the process of creating another stack to work from for a few days. Recently I realized the translation and adjustment from the computer screen to the printer (let alone from the actual scene to the camera to the computer) was a waste of time, paper and ink. If I could find a way to load several variations of the scene into a mini-tablet mounted on a flexible holder, I could pan and zoom at will, not to mention change brightness, contrast and color balance on the fly.
A little trial and error with a mock up version, followed by some farm-grade machining and fabrication in the shop yielded the perfect holder for a Craigslist iPad mini-2 with its high resolution screen and the inexpensive Pixelmator app to enable infinite zooming...held to a gooseneck from a shop light with a switchable magnet. I still have to perform all the usual mental and visual gymnastics to translate the transmitted light image and colors to a reflected light image in oil paint as I go, but it's a vast improvement over my previous system.
This painting is about a month away from completion now, and as the overpainting continues to develop and the details emerge from the gestures of the initial sketch, I always marvel at how the effort is repaid in the depth and richness of the overall effect in the entire painting. There's no shortcut or substitute for a complete understanding of what I'm painting months (or years) after I took the source photographs and fully experienced the scene in person, but the new system is a big help.
My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram