I won't be sending these this often, but I had been working on this image for a few days and since it was finished I thought I would send it along. As an aside, a couple of friends who had watched me working on these pieces asked, "So what are going to do with those when you are done?"
A strangely insightful question to which I have no final answer. It is obvious, to me anyhow, that I create these images because I find the process "self-affirming." They are the manifestation of the second tenet of Distilled Harmony: Enable Beauty. Or if you prefer the non-BS version: Making them makes me happy.
Right now, sending them out to you seems better than just stacking them up in my home office. I will, I suppose, eventually have to do something with them. "Curating" them in a form that is palatable to you does force me to create versions of the images that I will - I think - allow me, post Covid, to hawk them to some "real" galleries in downtown Chicago, and some online spaces. We'll see. In the meantime, here is Sailing Ship. [I think if you click on the pics they pop out in a larger format]
This is the original photograph. The ship is located outside the Hotel Saturnia & International in Venice, Italy. I took the shot during our trip there in 2018. Great Spritzs in the bar!
The photo then gets opened in Photoshop where I remove the parts I want to design and color. That leaves me with the image above. I have a couple of options now. I want an image that is 10 or 11 inches square. Too big for any of our home printers, and they would return questionable quality. So I use Staples. I can either send them the file digitally or mask up and take it in on a thumb drive. Either way I end up with the above image on 11x17 heavy stock at a cost of less than 2 bucks! I usually pop for a few. From this point on everything is non-digital, old fashioned drawing.
Next I create the design, drawing it in the white spaces in black marker. That leaves the version above which I color using a variety of markers. Which results in version 1 below.
Version 1.
It is called Version 1 because after living with it a few days I discovered I wasn't really all that fond of it. Too busy, particularly around the sails which seemed to run into each other.
So I went back to the blank white version and redrew the designs a bit and did another version in which I tried to tone down the colors and to darken the edges of the sails so they would 'pop' a bit more. That resulted in Version 2 below.
Version 2
I like this version better. But if I were to do a version 3, I think I would go back and white out the sea below the ship and fool around with trying to make it look a bit more "water-ish."
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