today I received my package from jacksons that has the brushes (and water mixable oil colour in white - I only just realised I have the other colours at home last week so.. I could have painted more but I enjoyed the digital drawings immensely)
anyway, I have a spare board that I already primed white - and I was just choosing different photos that I could trace - I wanted to try how well it would work out if I traced and painted using this mini projector. There were a lot of intriguing looking images that I would love to paint - including the collages I made that afternoon below (I had wanted to collage the imagery of the ikebana screenshots and the amusement park imagery for a long time now - will do more) however my board available now was too small and this projector was too pixellated for this sort of size..
instead I opted for this image I really like, which is went I went to the Nagoya city science museum in japan - there was a station with an anatomical model where kids could rearrange the organs, and learn about the human body. I just thought that imagery was really curious, so I took some pictures - and this was one of my favourites. The colours were also bright and hopefully fit for tracing.
also, I realised that the best images projected, for tracing, would probably be animation screenshots (for example from Nausicaam, the explosion below) or diagrams, which are colourful and has clean, clear lines (pictured is just a sceintific diagram/drawing of a heart and also the extinct nz bird moa)
anyway, I actually had quite a lot of difficulty with this particular projector (too pixellated even if far away - and cropped because of distance limit) - compared to the usual printing out and tracing (which takes way more time and labour)
if I wanted to continue with this method, it might be better to get a better projector - like the one ursula from the film/video department let me use when I attended that workshop on projection mapping. (so much crisper quality and apparently you can project up to over 200cm for a 'cinematic experience' and is around £400..)
I think I still prefer traditional tracing - though I would love to experiment with the things I can do with a projected image - like when I randomly came across this video of neal tait, where he was demonstrating how hes doing a really quick painting using projection, not thinking about it too much.
How to Paint with Watercolour: Neal Tait
I really like this 'temporary' and 'fast' nature of this method - kind of reminds me of what I tried very spontaneous ways of 'collaging' - when I was layering imagery as I went on building up layers in my digital drawing - their presence can be as faint as a lingering ghost or, as permanent as a darkened silhouette. Another curious thing is that I can't remember the last time I painted upright - my canvas is always on the table or horizontal... hmm. this could change a lot of aspects of the work.
in this experimental session I also had this foam thing lying around from the packaging for my (really cheap and pixellated) projector (which I intend to use to my advantage somehow - I do really like the viusal of blocks of colour, reminds me of how dan paints his paintings except of course he paints really meticulously). I projected onto this thing for fun, and I actually really like the result, I think, particularly, if it was some sort of violent imagery, it would get visually diffused out, and I think that speaks to the desensitization that I often feel... other than that, it just is interesing to look at, really soft and I wonder how video would look - probably really abstract. definitely something that could be really something, if I had a giant piece of foam board - and experiment with more and less pixellated projectors. both black and white / very vibrant, and also - diagram and photograph - looked really intriguing.
also, this is really random but the foam packaging where the projector actually fits into with the other gear is this compartmental shape and I was imagining it as a gallery space somehow.. and shining the projector light through and imagining that to be the room of where I want my video of my drawing to be... anyway, I liked the eerieness foam is able to bring out from the combination of harsh light and the inevitable diffusion of the material. it seems so detrimental to the environment too...
I took some on my digital camera too:
I don't know what I was trying to do or capture, but I was taking some on my DSLR camera too (which sort of failed because I couldn't get it to focus, still learning how to use it...) (if anything, they're just shadowy photos to look at..)
also, I was projecting onto my blanket and other walls just to see what that will look like (reminded me of the projection mapping workshop again - it adds another layer of meaning to the image..)
anyway, I'm dropping other images I took when choosing what kind of image I wanted to trace, I thought these looked better as projections / not fit for tracing:
