Oil painting substrates; Multimedia Artboard

The last few paintings I've featured from my recent France travels are done on Multimedia Artboard. I posted about this surface before when I was getting ready for my trip, and I thought I'd write a little more about it as a follow up. I really enjoyed this surface, especially for traveling and painting en plein air. For one thing, it is very thin, so you can pack a good number of these boards and not take up a ton of room in your suitcase. You can also cut the board to size very easily with either a guillotine-type paper cutter or an exacto knife.

In fact, it is so lightweight that when I first ordered this material I thought I had been sent the wrong product. I was expecting a board, and what I got was something that seemed more like a rigid watercolor paper. I even called the manufacturer to ask about it. I will say that the manufacturer was extremely helpful, and was almost at a point where he was willing to ship me some board from his own stock so that I'd have some for my trip, even though I hadn't originally purchased it from him. But he told me, "If it's my board it should be very rigid. In fact, it will shatter if you try to bend it." Sure enough, when I put it to the test, it did.

That's the one thing to be careful of with this product--but protect the corners in travel and don't drop it from a balcony, and you should be fine. It has a rough side and a smoother side to it, so you have a choice on which side to paint, depending on your needs. I also like that it accepts a variety of media--watercolor, acrylic AND oil. It can accept oils either as is, or primed, if you wish, with gesso. I double primed mine, but it was a little slick, so I think next go around I'll try it unprimed to see what that's like.

While the board is rigid, because it is thinner than a "board", I taped mine to a larger board (gatorboard or coroplast) to give me a stronger work surface.  For framing, I can simply pop it in a frame backed by a sturdier board and it's ready to go.

I am finding the Multimedia Artboard much easier to mount and frame after the fact than the other surface I took with me, a fine-weave primed linen. And while linen has luxurious qualities all its own, I can easily and happily see myself going back and forth between these two surfaces for my plein air painting travels.

Photographing oil paintings for the web

Thanks to my niece Molly, a talented artist in her own right, for inspiring this blog post: So you have a nice little painting you've just completed, but none the photographs you took do it justice. How can you get decent photos for your website? I am certainly no expert photographer, but I will share what I do for my own website to produce decent reproductions of flat art for online display.

Photographing artwork is definitely a little tricky. If the artwork has any sheen at all, any flash or angled light can cause glare on the surface, which will distract or obscure the true nature of the picture. These days, I use a digital camera for all of my photography and tend to do a fair amount of color correction in Photoshop.  But I used the same method of photography I will describe below, even in the pre-digital age when I made slides of my work. 

The best conditions I've found for photographing artwork is outside on a bright but cloudy day. This gives consistent diffused light and the least amount of glare. If photographing on a sunny day, try to set your painting up at the edge of a shaded area so that enough light reaches the painting without shining directly on it. Tree shade isn't good because of the dappling. It needs to be even light, so maybe an overhang on the side of a building or something.

If you are shooting film or are otherwise not able to correct the camera angle after the fact, you'll need to make sure your canvas is as perpendicular to the camera as possible. You can either set it up on an easel or hang it on a wall on the side of a building if the overhang isn't too large. To avoid the fish-eye effect that can occur because of a wide-angle lens curve, you should set your camera up on a tripod far enough away from the painting and zoom all the way in on your painting to fill the lens as best you can with the picture. This will minimize that fish-eye distortion. (Thanks to artists David Darrow, James Abbott and others in the Daily Painters Discussion group for this and other technical tips!) 

When photographing, I use my camera's manual setting so that I can set the white balance and bracket the exposures, just in case what I'm seeing in the viewfinder isn't what I get on my computer screen. Then I'll examine all of these images in Photoshop, and with the painting sitting next to me, I'll make adjustments to the chosen image in brightness, contrast, color, etc. Photoshop is great also for correcting the picture if the painting doesn't look exactly square. But Photoshop is also $$$ so if you don't already have it, you might look for a cheaper image editing software program that can do most of these basic corrections.

For the web, I will overlay my copyright info and save my images as 72 dpi JPEGs. For archiving, though, I save the image at the largest size my camera setting will allow, and save it as a TIFF. JPEGs are fine for web stuff, but not great for archiving because it is a "lossy" image format. This means that every time the JPEG is opened it looses a bit of information, even if it is a large file. For any kind of high quality reproduction (such as giclee prints), the best option is to have the painting professionally scanned or photographed at a very high resolution.

Vibrant new show for the First Fridays Art Walk tonight

It's raining now, but they're predicting a clearing by 5PM, so head out to the First Fridays art walk downtown tonight. We're open early from 6 to 8:30, and there's ususally plenty of parking on Main Street. Opening tonight at the gallery: "A Touch of Red"- New and recent landscape paintings from Provence to the Tropics with a splash of Valentine's Day red.

"A Place in the Sun", Key West Oil on Canvas, 16x20" ©Jennifer Young

Where we are: 

Jennifer Young Studio & Gallery is located at 16 East Main Street, (between 1st and Foushee) two blocks east of the Jefferson Hotel.

New winter/spring hours: 

Beginning in February, gallery hours for the winter/spring season are Wednesday through Friday from 12-6 PM and Saturdays from 11-2.

We're also open during the First Fridays Richmond Art Walk from 6 to 8:30 PM and by appointment at other times. For additional information contact us or call 804-254-1008. Click here to view a map and get driving directions from your location.

New "Art for Food" charity auction listed- Provence watercolor

Here is the latest in my series of charity auctions for the Central Virginia Foodbank. I am listing this little Provence watercolor of the Luberon Valley  on eBay, and you will notice some adjustments to the listing due to the things I wrote about in my previous posts here and here.

“Summer Vineyard” Overall size 8×10″ (image size 5×7″) (SOLD) ©Jennifer Young

Online charity art auctions- The learning curve part II

Look for a new "Art for Food" auction posting later today. Meanwhile, here's  a follow-up to my previous post  on the charity art auctions I'm holding for the CVFB. Filed under the "hadn't thought of that one" category: 1. Sales tax: Only after a couple of auctions were listed did it dawn on me that I probably had to collect VA sales tax. Doh! A call to the VA Dept. of Taxation confirmed this.  I am selling the item and then once I collect the profits, I'm turning around and donating the money to charity. Even though it's a donation, it's still a retail sale and subject to the tax for in-state sales. I can't really do anything about past auctions but pay the tax myself. But for the future a statement to collect sales tax in Virginia will be included in the listings. 

2. Framing: Due to the time involved in listing and promoting the auctions, making the donations, as well as packaging and shipping (not to mention creating the artwork), I cannot provide an in-house framing service for the charity auctions. Watercolors should be framed under glass, and shipping glass requires a lot more time and care in the packing and additional cost (and risk). It also adds another dimension of confusion to my whole accounting process. The good news is that these pieces are created in sizes that can be matted inexpensively, and fit easily into standard-size frames  found readily at local frame shops and even craft stores.

3. Donations: I started these auctions out with 100% of the proceeds going to the charity. However, since these auctions are an ongoing 6 month project, I really do have to consider the processing costs. Paypal, my online money transfer agent, assesses processing fees, reducing the total amount that I collect. If I can designate 95% of the proceeds to the charity, this will defray my costs for processing and any listing fees (for eBay listings and/or extra features).

More thoughts on eBay: I've been reading more on the eBay/Missionfish deal and can see that there might be some benefits to listing there. I've learned that in addition to your auction being listed on eBay's site and in the GivingWorks category, it is also listed on Missionfish. There are claims of better visibility and higher returns for GivingWorks listings over regular listings. Without having listed there I don't know how accurate that is.

The main hesitation I've been having are the Missionfish fees. At first blush, 15-20% of the donation seems like a painfully large processing fee. Will it really save that much time over ArtByUs in the processes of listing, fulfillment, documentation and donation? Will the venues provided through eBay GivingWorks increase the number of bids? If those two things were true, it might very well be worth a try.