Sakura – giclee
this is one of the giclees i received over the weekend but just stretched yesterday. the original painting is 6 x 12 inches, but this piece is 8 x 15. i touched up and enhanced it a bit with the skills i’ve learned since the original was created [minor tricks, really, having to do with shadow and light and anatomy ... that i'm still learning]. some things i couldn’t really fix without having to redo the entire thing, so i did what i could and am particularly pleased. the only thing left at this point is the fresh application of gold leaf then a little clean up work round the edges.
i also did a bit more work on “Eva”. i realized that i work better with the white laid out first and then working around it in payne’s gray. so i had to put away the dark and lay down the bones of white instead. the tough part is waiting for paint to dry when you’re ready to jump into something. hopefully it’ll be dry enough to work with tonight.
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paintings and repaintings
i had ordered several giclees recently and they have come in. i stretched them tonight. all but one, as i didn’t buy all the bars i needed. Voodoo Child … i never did get a decent high resolution shot so the image i had could only be enlarged up to something like 6 x 8 or something like that. i took a chance and ordered a larger image … 8 x 11. there was the chance it would be blurry, but i was willing to take the chance and see what the results were. they weren’t TOO bad, but i could definitely tell. it was sort of like what a tattoo looks like when it starts to blow out. it was very minute, mostly in the dark areas that butted against the whites, kind of a like a faint bleed. so … i took my palette and began fixing it. before i knew it i was enhancing things without going overboard to make the painting look too very different from the original [since this is for a friend who was interested in purchasing the original]. what turned out was a punched up version of the original that, dare i say, i like better. it’s more dramatic, there’s more metallic and carbon pigment and i was able to add gold where it seemed to have needed to be in the original [but missed, since it was a piece i'd worked long at ... after a while you lose sight of what is needed, what you intend.] at any rate, here’s the original:
and here is the handpainted giclee:
![voodoo child [giclee]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3113/2418386430_4f9d4ab6c0_m.jpg)
close up:
i know it still seems blurry, but chalk that up to user error on the camera side. [too much caffeine and sugar!!] also, the middle photo looks a bit wonky .. i had to take a photo at an angle to reduce glare, then distort it in photoshop. soon as it’s dry, i can scan it. at 8 x 11, it’s a perfect scannable size.
in other news, my first giclee painting, NIGHT BLOOM, sold. 
as i type this, the 1978:Tom Waits giclee repainting is drying on the shelf. more to come later.
