P&GD 10 Color Enhancer -- great for artists!

[jon404]

Having fun today sketching a copy of that newly discovered Da Vinci pastel, La Bella Principessa. When finished, took a photo, put it into P&GD 10. Oops! An area around the subject's eye was too yellow. Erase and redraw? Oh, no. That new control, Color Enhancer to the rescue. Made a copy to work on, cut out the offending area, used Enhancer to get rid of the yellow (changed it toward blue). Pasted the cutout back onto the original, all done. See below.

P&GD also was a great time saver when I started the drawing. Got a digital copy of Da Vinci's work, flopped it so that all the little ink lines went up and to the right (I'm right-handed, he was left-handed), then desaturated it and made a very light gray printout on card stock, to draw on with my pencils and ink pens. Here, P&GD saves a tremendous amount of layout time. For portraits, that's the part you always get wrong and have to do over. But not anymore. Xara software is great for artists!

[Grenou]

Xara is brilliant, not just for 'artists' but for anyone who is interested in any form of graphics.

You sketch well :-)

Grenou

[gwpriester]

Nice.

[jon404]

Thanks. But P&GD is the key. It goes deeper:

We Xara-users are at the beginning of a sea-change in the art world. Not digital per se, but the concept of an infinitely reproduceable final product. And this new final product, let's imagine it as a PDF or JPG, has a VERY interesting feature. If you take the PDF or JPG to a FedEx Office, any place with a color copying machine, you'll get a beautiful glossy-waxed finish when printed on flat business-card stock. The look of the print... the feel of it... is MUCH better than my pen & pencil original. Particularly if you draw the original larger than the final print, thank you P&GD for easy resizing.

Besides sharing your art for anyone to print, the recipient can also view it on screen, or on their TV... any device it can be sent to. On the small side, on their cell phone. Or on new gadgets like Google Glass and smart wristwatches.

So. Infinitely reproduceable art... available to anyone for immediate viewing anytime, anywhere. Or to print out and hang on a wall. But then, as Da Vinci would say, "Dove sono i fiorini d'oro?" Where's the money? God knows. But digital might just send us back to the time of Pope Julius III, ultra-rich patron of Michelangelo and Raphael, commissioning that Sistine Chapel ceiling for all to see without charge, beautiful art, free, to all. What do you think?

Here's a start -- on this Forum, looks like my max size for this one is 800 px high, instead of its original 2100 px, which was set so you could print the attached JPG, the trim it to 5x7" (outside the cream-colored border) or to 4x6", trim just inside the thin black line. Then frame, it's yours. Anyway, for TG folks, enjoy it on a screen. Or send it to someone else... remember, it's infinitely reproduceable. No originals in this ballgame!

[Big Frank]

the one thing that really stands out is your enthusiasm
its pouring with rain and im not feeling too well and your post was a pleasure to read
thank you and keep scanning sketching resizing printing and sharing

[handrawn]

firstly - xara is not unique in what it does regarding the reworking of images

secondly - what looks best is very subjective from one person to the next

third - I'd have been much happier if you had used something original in your example - by not doing so you have exemplified one real down-side to all of this, that art may dumb down to the level of blogging in terms of proliferation and standard of work

Edit - ie it would have been better to reinterpret at the very least, just copying is the artistic equivalent of having nothing new to say

[Boy]

Handrawn, I imagine the weather in the UK is very gloomy today.

Jon404, thank you for sharing some of your experiences with P&GD and showing the results of using the new Color Enhancer.

[wizard509]

Thank you jon404 for your explanation. Most illuminating.

[jon404]

Thanks for the comments! Frank... I hope this finds you feeling better.

Handrawn -- great minds are thinking alike today. I guess you can go at it, as i am here, from the Chinese point of view -- copying a master as best you can, to get better yourself. Or, you can go Western, where originality is prized above all... but didn't that just lead to the horrors of modern art?

The cat is out of the bag, you know. The internet, even better than books, provides an infinite source of photos and illustrations. I like airplanes, and there are any number of really, really good aircraft drawings available to download and copy. For me, practicing again with pen and pencil after many years away. Fun... retired now, not business. But if it were, a certain tension. If I sell a pencil sketch made from an unknown artist's original drawing, am I stealing that creation? Is what I'm doing any different than just re-selling the original art, and calling it my own? Or, via my sketch, am I creating a new, unique artwork, free of copyright violation? Leading to a very basic question -- can I sign my sketch? Is it, actually, my work? Yes... or no?

Art in the time of the internet. Fascinating times, with these amazing tools like P&GD, like being able to desaturate and ghost out the starting image, no more layout problems. Capabilities that we all too often take for granted... until one day you revert back to childhood and pick up a pencil and say to yourself, "I'm going to draw that plane." And that is deeply enjoyable, and, picking up on Epicurus, isn't pleasure the purpose of life?

[handrawn]

now I am going to make an assumption here, which is that you have never actually seen 'La Bella Principessa', but only a copy - therefore you are not actually 'copying the master' because no matter how good the reproduction is you copied from it will not have the texture or catch the light like the original

therein is a big problem from my point of view with digital art in the sense of 'Fine Art' - it's likely that 3D printers will enable the reproduction of art with true texture, so that brush strokes etc have a solidity that rises from the page; imagining what sort of program/workstation will be involved to get that right is intriguing