Janeen

Ngaire Winwood · 04-12-2005, 11:50 PM

This is my first attempt at taking resource photos. I have been reading everyone's posts and I think? I have captured a good one to work from.

I am itching to do a painting of my friend Janeen. She came over the other day to play me her new song. I just had to grab the camera and take a shot.

I like the idea of a keeping the cool background with the warm colours for the flesh and guitar. Is it suitable to start working on it?

Here is the cropped version and the full length - are any of these suitable?

Terri Ficenec · 04-13-2005, 12:17 AM

Ngaire,
The images posted are so tiny, it's hard to see what you've actually got there. Any chance you could post them bigger?

Ngaire Winwood · 04-13-2005, 05:21 AM

Terri I have made it a little bigger, but I seem to go over the 100kb. I am still learning how to do it. I did it at 72 dpi. When I went larger the kb's went up to 12000. How do you guys get bigger without going up in Kb's? I read Cynthia's post about images and it is under 600 x 400

Julie Deane · 04-13-2005, 07:56 AM

Hi Ngaire -

It only allows 400 wide, so if you have a long photo, it reduces everything accordingly.

Carolyn Bannister · 04-13-2005, 08:19 AM

I have the same problem, I get around it by resizing (pixelwise) in Irfanview (free off the web) or photoshop, or anything else. Then saving it and opening with Paint and saving again.

For some reason opening and saving again in Paint compresses the kb dramatically without loosing definition. I would do the whole process in Paint but there is no way of telling it exactly what pixel size you want to resize to.

It's probably a long winded way about it but it works really well for me

Carolyn

Michele Rushworth · 04-13-2005, 01:56 PM

Sorry to say it, Ngaire, but personally, I wouldn't paint from these photos. The biggest issue I see is that the light is very frontal -- was the flash turned on? If you've read through the photography threads you've probably seen many artists suggest that the first step is to turn the flash off and pose the model near a window so there's natural light coming from slightly off to one side. The lighting in these photos has also given you oddly pink coloring to the skintones too.

The second issue I have with these photos is that you can't see the model's face.

And finally the angles of the limbs seem very awkward to me. It reminds me a bit of Picasso's blue man with a guitar, which you may love, but isn't the direction I'd go in for a traditional portrait.