Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Stonington, Maine


Painted from photo reference. I used my Scene Sketcher app to simplify
the image so I could build it up from bits of abstraction. 16" x 12"

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

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

Friday, October 2, 2015

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

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Friday, March 27, 2015

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".

Thursday, December 25, 2014

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.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

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!