Ruby Beach Gallery

Since I've been talking about Ruby Beach, I've added a gallery of images I've taken there. You'll find mostly photography in this gallery. In honor of the new gallery I decided to work further on more recent project, which is pictured here, Ruby Beach Creek.

 

This has been a problem print for me and I continue to hammer on it. I'm half satisfied with the version you see here. It is a stitch up of three images taken from the south side of the lagoon behind the beach. Usually I try and stitch up from a standard format lens, because the distortions are not as difficult to match, but in this case I used my 40mm Hasselblad lens which is quite wide, maybe the equivalent of an  18 or 20 in 35mm format. The weather was gray this day and there is a very high dynamic range between the sky and the shadows under the drift wood logs. (click on the image and then click on it again to get a larger view. On this website you can usually go two layers deep with clicks to give you larger images) 

I've found a way to trick my scanner by scanning my negatives as positives. For some reason this enables me to get a histogram where all the tones are represented with out any clipping. I then invert the scanned image in Photoshop. Since I always scan to 16bit files I have a lot of data to play with in resolving the tones. But the initial look is not what you would expect to see in a black and white print. I personally find it difficult to conceptualize my way back to the proper gamma curve for a good print.

Ruby Beach Dream

Click on this link to get an in-depth description of the technical and aesthetic process I went through to make this image. Lots of pictures to see along the way

 

Ruby Beach Dream, archival Ink jet print ,46" x 30"

Back to Sumi Painting

The last Daniel Colvin Fine Art invitation I sent out contained this image, Iridescent Ikebana painted on mulberry paper with Sumi Ink and Acrylic Pigments. I am beginning to arrange the studio to do more of this work on Asian Paper. Hopefully, if the weather is nice, I can paint outside, where I feel free to really splatter and swish the paint around. I've developed a style where I can use modern pigments, including metallic and iridescent colors and paint in this ancient style. The iridescent pigments are mostly lost on the computer screen so its an extra treat to see the original paintings and all the rich depth of color that exists there. I love this kind of painting because its very immediate and dramatic to do. check back in a week to see the first results.

Iridescent Ikebana by Daniel Colvin  Sumi ink and Acrylic on  Mulberry paper, 2005,  24" x39"

 Ikebana  refers to Japanese flower arranging and I'm often inspired to make 2d versions of this on paper. Or at least when I look at the result of some of my Sumi style still life's, I think of Ikebana. By the way, this original painting is still available for purchase. I hope to have a gallery of my Sumi Paintings up soon.

Invitation for Art Show

I volunteered to do the invite for my daughters first grade Art Show. I used the same design style I use for my own invites and used a piece of my daughters art instead. I also mixed up the fonts a bit. Here's where I ended up.

 

Atlas Dei Goes to DVD Factory

    Last week I put the final touches on the DVD authoring for Atlas Dei and then Sent a master disk to California for final Replication. The Publishing of the Atlas Dei DVD is major milestone in the saga of this film. It was about two years ago at this time that the folks at Global Mindshift (global-mindshift.org) called me and asked for my help with a web movie to talk about cosmology. Little did I know then that it would end up becoming the 90 minute feature length film of my animated art. I'm sure I'll be posting more stories about the making of Atlas Dei on this blog.

 If all goes well I will have shrink-wrapped product to sell by the end of may.  See colvinart.com or atlasdei.com for more details. Also you can learn about the music of Atlas Dei at robertrich.com. I've included a still here from the end of Chapter 6

 

my first blog

My friend Jim desrves great thanks for  helping me get this blog going.

Here is a preview of a new image I working on. It started with a normal 2.25 film shot of the Oregon dunes.