Hal, Reagan and Randy getting "the shot"!Photo courtesy of Victoria Schmitt
Randy's centers around creating a fine art canvas wrap with a healthy dose of fine art reproduction theory and practice. Each student will leave with a gallery quality piece of their own creation, from capture to finishing.
Yesterday started with a good session of essential color managment. We started with delta E, voyaged through Kelvin temps, and finished with soft proofing. Bottom line, consistency is key so calibrate, calibrate, and calibrate. Photo Right: by Randy's Mom
Not only did he talk about it, but Randy brought different viewing lights to see your prints under while proofing. He also had Eizo ship a monitor (Eizo CG211) over to us so we could use the top-of-the-line monitor for our proofs. For the unfamiliar, Eizo is the industry leader in monitor technology and accuracy and Wow does it show. Putting all this together with the X-rite Eye One system and our new Epson projectors we were dialed in. We also hooked up the Wacom Cintique so we could integrate and play with all of our toys. Randy led a great session of intense and essential color management!
Later that day we met up in Morro Bay next to the Great American Fish Company restaurant. This is a great place for photographing Morro Rock along with the bay and many great fishing and sailing boats in the harbor. If you want some great fish and chips, the restaurant is pretty good too! We spent a few hours waiting to see if the fog would clear enough to see the sunset colors like the night before but unfortunately it just became thicker. Regardless of the fog there were some incredible shots that came from the students in the little time we were there!
That night, sponsor Jerry Kuska from "Better Light" came bearing one of his digital scanning backs and two huge studio lights to scan student original paintings and pieces of fine art. With a lot of techno-babble, 3 busted fuses and several profiles, we were able to generate a fully calibrated fine-art reproduction facility by about 11 PM. It was quite a process to watch!
Today we began the process of finishing a project with a canvas wrap. We started with putting our stretcher bars together and graduated to optimizing our chosen images. There is some good math required to figure out the extra canvas size for the stretching part. When you stretch your canvas you want some print to wrap around the sides instead of white canvas. This way you do not have to have a frame and the piece looks finished properly and professionally.
Photo courtesy of Hal Schmitt
After lunch we were able to start the show and tell process of the student work. Some people brought images from home, some scanned and some have been shooting new work while they are here. We managed to get through about four of our students and each one received a print by the end of the day. We brought up each image on our projectors and the whole class critiqued and helped make adjustments to color, saturation, or contrast. Once the student was happy with what they came up with Randy would send it to the Epson 7800 to print a proof and finally a beautiful canvas print.
Photo courtesy of Victoria Schmitt
To continue the process, we met in the front gallery room to learn how to put gloss on the canvas prints with a small roller.
Hal and myself are here to help with questions or advice for any student who chooses to show up and work.
Photo courtesy of Victoria Schmitt
And Reagan is here too...the little trooper!
