Believe it or not, I’m keeping this up for at least two weeks in a row! I just checked my site analytics and four people visited the blog since last week, and I’m pretty sure I was at least one of those people. That’s kind of what I want at first, let me get some content in here before anyone starts paying attention.
I signed a contract with iCanvas last week to let them license some of my work. It could be interesting; it might lead to some passive income, it might lead to some positive exposure. It could also lead to some negative exposure, I’m not sure. If this results in cheap canvas prints of my work showing up at Target does that hurt or help my reputation as an artist? I really don’t know, but what I do know is that I love to make money off of my art, because that makes it so I can spend more money on my art, and that means I can make more and better art. So if people want to poo poo the idea of “selling out” by signing a contract with a big print retailer, I kind of feel like those people are gatekeeping a world I never had a chance of getting access to anyway.
Anyway, that passive income bit is still a ways away. When I signed the contract I promised to deliver high resolution images of 35 of my paintings. So far I’ve uploaded ten. The issue? Most the images I had on file were not good enough. I talked about a lot of this last week, I know, but I also know nobody read that. So I’ve got a real camera now, and I’m slowly getting new images for paintings I originally documented with my trusty iPhone XS (or, in some cases, my old iPhone 7+). I’ve gotten back into doing things with real cameras, and am pretty good at setting up speed lights now too. The new pictures are coming out great, with very little glare and terrific resolution on the fine details. Lines that look chunky and thick in some old photos are showing up as delicate in the new photos. Colors are not blown out. Part of this is probably the better sensor in the Canon 90D, part of it is probably all the computational photography tricks the iPhone was doing behind the scenes.
For each new photo I have to find the painting, put it up on the one stretch of wall that isn’t covered by painting storage or windows, get the camera set up, and take the pictures. I’ve got to import the photos into Lightroom. I’ve got to make notes on which paintings I’m working with in my task manager so I don’t just import into Lightroom and never see them again. In Lightroom I need to organize and find the best exposures. I edit the best full image picture in Photoshop to fix perspective and optimize the histogram. I band-aid tool any obvious nail-holes in the wall. I save a copy with a bit of wall showing behind the painting, and a copy cropped to the picture frame. Back in Lightroom I adjust exposure on all the detail images before exporting them to jpeg. Then I upload everything to Artwork Archive, which integrates with Squarespace to produce the Portfolio and Archive views here. Then I upload the cropped full image to iCanvas’s CMS. In my task manager I optimistically also have check boxes for “update Saatchi” and “update Singulart” for each piece, but I’m ignoring those for now. So anyway, it takes a while.
On a good night, after the kids are asleep and I’ve cleaned the kitchen, folded any laundry, done my 15 minute language lessons, and set up the coffeemaker for the next morning, I can usually get through editing and uploading images for one painting before I need to go to bed. That’s assuming they’ve already made it to Lightroom and are organized correctly.
This week, I’ve gotten imaged updated for:
In this studio this week, all I did was take pictures. I’ve got images for ten more paintings that are going into iCanvas, and six more that I just want to update. The plan is to slowly update everything, but these things can take a while and I need to get back to actually painting while I’m in the studio.
In other art news, I had high hopes for getting into a show called “Illumination” at Gallery Twist in Lexington, but none of the pieces I submitted made it in.
Ok. Hope to have more to report next week and not just moaning about how much work it is to edit photos. Thanks for reading.