A walk in the woods

I've somehow lost my motivation to pick up a paintbrush the moment. So I've picked up my camera again, and, having recently purchased Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CS6, I'm spending quite some time learning how to use them. Which has inspired me to do some processing using textures again.

I've also started uploading photos to my 500px account. It's a photo sharing comunity that focuses more on the quality of the photography than the comunity, although you can also follow other members, and leave comments etc. I've signed up there at least two years ago, but haven't uploaded an awful lot. The quality of the photography there is just mindblowing, and I was really intimidated to add my amateurish experiments. But if you want to learn and improve, you best learn from the best, and 500px is a great source to get inspired, and see how the pros do it.

I've also created an account at Ipernity, which is sort of the new Flickr. I got tired with Flickr some time ago, and with their new layout and everything that they've introduced recently, I can't even find my way around there anymore. Ipernity sort of is what Flickr used to be before it got too popular and redesigned. And for old Flickr users, there's really a lot that looks very familiar. Unfortunately, there also seems to be all, or at least a lot, of what I came to dislike about Flickr. But I'll give it a try for a while, and see how I like it.

So I'm going to take a little break from painting, and with autumn finally arrived, I hope to get out with my camera for long walks in the autumnal woods, dive deeper into Lightroom and Photoshop, do lots of processing, and hopefully find my inspritation for painting again.

Now, who's going to pour the tea?

September just flew by, and last week was so busy that I had to give Paint Party Friday a miss. I had actually managed to finish a painting the weekend before, but I just never got round to edit the photos, and put it all into a blog post. But this week, things are back to normal again, and I'm very happy to finally share the painting, made after the sketch in my art journal page that I made first.

Again I kept it simple, with just a little bit of collage bits added. Instead of the map, I used some book paper here to give the table cloth some texture. The photo below also has my favourite, handmade tea cup in it. It really was just the perfect cup. But unfortunately, I've smashed it to pieces in the mean time, by droping a full jar of honey on it, and splashing the freshly made Sencha tea in it all over my kitchen.

Talking about photo editing. Taking photos of my paintings really drives me mad. Getting the right light is a challenge, and reproducing the exact colours seems simply impossible. Even with tweaking everything in Lightroom and Photoshop. Well, this is what the whole painting looks like...

40x40cm, acrylic, no title yet

... but these are more like the actual colours. It's not such a great difference, but you can still see it clearly in the shades of the tea pot (let alone in comparison to the actual colours in the original painting), and it really drives me mad. I'll have to keep working on that.

I'm thinking about going through my kitchen cupboards and cabinets to get all my tea pots out, and to turn them into a little series. And I've got some other ideas for tea paintings too. It's going to be a proper tea party.

But now it's time for a nice cup of tea, while having a look at what everyone else has been

 busy with over at the wonderful  

Paint Party Friday.

Project 365 | September 2013

Whathever happened to September gone?? It was only just the end of August, after the summer heat waves I was ready to enjoy the more agreeable temperatures of late summer at the fullest, and here we are, at the beginning of October. September really just whizzed past this year. Apart from the first four days of the months, which I did enjoy to the fullest in mild and sunny Dorset, the rest of the month has been quite uninspiring - proof of which are also the many photos of food and tea this month, the things to take a photo of it there just isn't anything else.

After having "missed" September, I'm now determined to make the most of October and autumn. Let's hope it'll be a nice one.