Main St., Gloucester, MA

Painted from a snapshot I took while looking for lunch, 9" x 12". I used my
Scene Sketcher app to simplify the view: Google Play: Scene Sketcher

View from room 305, Claremont Hotel, Southwest Harbor, Maine

Late afternoon, looking across Somes Sound towards Acadia National Park.
33 cm x 33 cm.

It's Alive!!

Scene Sketcher is available for free at

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.scenesketcher&hl=en

movin' to Montana

Debris on my desk including a postcard from Montana. 11" x 17"

Calumet can, flowers, oranges

Saturated color, pretty loose. Painted with the aid of my Scene Sketcher app
which lives in public beta on Google Play. 11" x 14".

Vermont Farm

I painted this from a photo using my new SceneSketcher Android app. I used the
app to break down the photo into separate dark, mid, and light images that isolated
the colors in each value range. I used the app's measuring tool to layout the image
on canvas. Drawing and staying on track with a plan are two of my bigger painting
problems, and the app made me more comfortable with both. 10" x 15"

Here's a link to the site I made for the app: www.scenesketcher.com Let me know if
you're interested in beta testing - should be ready in a couple of weeks.

my Android app

About three months ago, I was starting a painting and wondered if I could
find an app for my Android tablet that would help me paint.  I was surprised
that I couldn't find one to help in the basic stages of blocking in a value study.
So I decided to learn how to code for Android and see what I could come up
with.  Here's a sample image from the app I've made:

My app is basically a convenience, touch-enabled photo editor with aspect, pan, 

zoom and lock controls. The most interesting feature, though, is that it has an 

interactive gray scale display. 

This mode makes it easy to flip back and forth between color and gray versions of 

an image that can be panned and zoomed.  The number of values and the amount of 

blurring applied in converting a color image to gray scale can be adjusted to a 

desired level of abstraction, similar to squinting.  With a long-press gesture at

a point of interest on the screen, the value band the point lies in can be toggled back 

and forth between gray and color. By pressing points on the screen, it's possible to

set some or most of the image to bands of gray and just show selected value ranges 

in color. The toggle is pretty fast because the gray scale uses optimized code that 

runs on a tablet's graphics processor.  I'm thinking the gray scale toggle will be 

helpful to channel one's focus, but I haven't tried painting from it yet.

I'm not all that far from releasing what I've got so far as an app, but it seems like

there's always another bug and more to be done!

Mill Brook Valley, Arlington, MA

Painted from a Google street view of Arlington, Massachusetts.  Mill Brook
flows in a greenbelt just beyond this intersection creating a beautiful little
valley that cuts through the town.  I premixed some of the main colors, and was
able to lay down about half the painting rather quickly over a charcoal sketch.
Then I bogged down in detail.  This is the right half of a diptych. 16" x 20"