Friday, July 30.

Busy day Family activities - just had time for this - a QP but painted right on top, making me look much more bootiful than I am but adhering to a likeness. Got to go to work now. Spent my earlier work time trying to consolidate my blog files. I really have scattered digitally this past year and am now faced with a huge job imposing order !

Back to the home portrait . . .?

Not yet. I found a sweet (and I do mean that literally as the fresh baked pastries are superb) cafe that opens early in Picton and has WiFi,good Guatemalan coffee, good music AND seems to be the local hangout of cuoice here. Miss Lilly's and Lilly is the name of the cat that actually lives in the adjoining bookstore called Books & Company.

So I went here after finishing at the Golf Course this morning to work on my laptop Blog eating fresh almond torte. A very nice radiologist named Ants approached me to ask about the wacom tablet. We had a very nice swap of technology info & I took the opportunity to show him & his wife Inga some of my work and give them a biz card. Being a very amiable fellow, he posed for a "Quickie".

To make a living one has to spend less than one earns.

Here is a Home Portrait. The price point appears to be about $400 which means I need to be able to finish and deliver inside of a week. That includes: taking the photos (weather permitting of course and always at the best time of day for best light/shadow patterns); painting; proofing; printing and finishing. It goes without saying that framing would have to be extra. But the conundrum is: how to get Realtors to desire this for closing gifts. That is assuming I can even accomplish a satisfying painting within those constraints.

So, let's try the process.

Starting with a very low resolution image in Painter - For this, I will use the web image measuring 500 x 230 pixels. My goal is to try to "tell the story of the Home with a maximum of 5 colours.
Well, I did not succeed in my goal of 5 colours.


As you can see I used 9 basic colours which seem to be the minimum to get all the elements to represent the composition. Now to hone that composition.

After working about 2 hours and not completing the clean up, I decided it was time to tranfer to the big screen of the iMac. Some ambiguous areas, under the eaves for example, were demanding definition. The goal is to get to the level of definition seen on the left side of the painting.

And now it i 2010.

I have moved and been establishing a totally new life. So much of the old life is impossible to replace. Replace isn't the right word really. It's more that many "sectors" of my identity cannot be re-allocated. My condo investment is not really satisfying but I pray that the real estate market will reward me eventually. The part-time job has benefits in that I am learning more about printing from Macs, but my body is suffering for exercise and the hours are so irregular. My work space has tremendous possibilities but those have been thwarted again and again. The list goes on . . . Do I ask too much or just for the wrong things?