We go for lots of long walks, especially at weekends.  On one such trek we found ourselves under the piercing gaze of one of the local hawks.

If we had been small and lightweight, we wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Instead we had a great time watching him fly slowly over.

It almost seemed like he was showing off for us.

He swooped down, stayed low, and then, when he figured he’d best be getting on, he was gone.

These great photos were taken by Tony (to see his blog click here on: Song For Jasmine.

I’ve been working hard to learn Adobe Photoshop, color management, the printing process, and how to photograph art originals to produce fine art prints.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I subscribed to Safari Books Online in order to read the books I needed on these subjects.

I did read all the books I mentioned in that post, and then I also worked through another book, which I recommend very highly to anyone who wants a thorough foundation in using Adobe Photoshop and how to build an efficient workflow:  “Real World Adobe Photoshop CS3: Industrial-Strength Production Techniques” by David Blatner, Conrad Chavez, and Bruce Fraser.

I continued to take notes, as I described before, so that in the future I can go back to my notebook to see how to do specific tasks.  I set myself a tight schedule and was very relieved when I finally finished this area of study, and I’m very pleased with the information I learned.  It has enabled me to find out what equipment is necessary, and how to use it, in order to be able to produce reproductions of the artwork as prints.

At Safari Books Online, I also discovered and watched all of Ron Lemen’s video lessons on how to draw and paint, using both traditional mediums and Photoshop.  I thought the videos were fantastic.  I learned loads from them.  This YouTube video below, shows excerpts from the videos:

So I studied a large number of books, watched videos, gained access to books that were not yet published, for timely information, and was able to look into a much larger number of books to see if I was interested in reading them in more detail: all for a $42 month subscription.  Safari Books Online allows you to deactivate your account, so that it will not continue to be billed into the next month.  Later, you can reactivate your account at any time.  There are no penalties or fees for activating/deactivating the account.

I had the subscription for one month, and was able to fully complete my research and studies in that time.  It was a very pleasant experience, though it was hard work. I was almost sad to deactivate the account; it felt like I was saying goodbye to an old friend.  In the future, when I have another research project I won’t bother going to bookstores in search of books, I’ll go straight to their site.

I’m enthusiastic about the Safari Books Online service, and have mentioned it again on DweezelJazz Art blog, just because I found it so useful and thought you might too.  I’m very cautious with subscribing to services on the web, and it’s great to find something that has been well thought out and is a pleasure to use and, very importantly, easy and hassle-free to stop when you want to.

Gradually I’m bringing together all the facets of creating art that I need in order to go forward with my aspirations.  Now, enough of the studying!  It’s fun, but I much prefer to draw and paint.  And that’s what’s next on the agenda.  My goal is to produce art and beautiful pictures that make me, and hopefully others, feel good, adding a little bit more fun and joy into the world, maybe just a tiny spark of that thrill that comes with watching a hawk effortlessly glide on the air currents.

"Portrait of a Horse" in egg tempera by Nat Wildish

Selling art seems, at first glance, to be a fairly easy thing to accomplish.  But there are loads of things to learn.  This last couple of weeks I’ve been concentrating on understanding how to make prints.

I’ll have two sources of artwork for prints: my egg tempera paintings and digital artwork that I paint on the computer.  The egg tempera paintings can either be scanned or photographed in order to create prints; I’ve chosen to photograph them.  The digital paintings need to be created, right from the start, at the correct size and resolution in order to print properly.  It doesn’t work to paint them on a ’small canvas’ document and then expect them to print larger.  And scaling the document below 75% or above 120% digitally doesn’t generally give good results.

This means that right up front, before I create the artwork, I need to decide what size prints to produce.  I’ve spent the last week reading four really good books on the process of printing, considering all the options, and how to process the digital files to be sure of color consistency and sharpness of the print.

I’ve been able to find out how to color-manage the whole process, from the camera, the monitor, right through to the printer, and how to either work with a print service provider, or to print them myself with a printer at home. I’ve found out what papers and inks to use, what calibration and profiling equipment is best, how to process Camera Raw digital files, and how to use Photoshop to implement the whole process.

Access to the online library Safari Books Online, created in 2001 by O’Reilly Media, Inc. and The Pearson Technology Group, has enabled me to thoroughly and quickly research the subject.  This service is fantastic.  For a monthly subscription of $42, it allows unlimited reading of all of their books and training videos, or for $22 they allow ten books per month.  They offer a great deal at several different subscription rates, click here for more details about the subscriptions.

There’s no obligation to continue the subscription beyond one month, and it can be canceled at any time, so long as it’s cancelled before the start of the next monthly billing cycle.  They have loads of really great informative books; buying each individual book would incur a very large expense.  There’s a good introduction to the service in a review written a year ago on developerlife.com – reviews.  This helped me to get a better understanding of how the service worked, and then I looked into the details on the Safari Books Online site itself before subscribing.

"Maldives Palm" in egg tempera by Nat Wildish

I usually take notes when I read textbooks or informative books.  This allows me to quickly access the information I find most helpful in a book, in a layout easy for me to quickly scan visually.  It means that, in the future, I don’t have to sift through the entire contents of a book to find the details that I want to use.  And while I’m taking notes, it allows me to process and understand what I’m reading at much greater depth.  I find it a very efficient and effective way to work. Doing things this way, I rarely need to keep a book once I’ve read it.

I love the idea of being able to access this information online without having to waste the resources it would take to have that book in print, delivered or bought from a store and then to not need it after reading it for a few days.  It’s a much more environmentally friendly way to go about things, and one that my way of working naturally accommodates.

The Safari Books Online has been vital in enabling me to access really good books on a subject that is otherwise extremely difficult to get a good grasp of.  And until I read all four books that I chose to read on the subject of printing, I really didn’t feel equipped to move forward with the process.  The Safari Books Online service also provides what they call ‘Rough Cuts’, in which authors provide the text of a book while they’re writing it.  One of the books I read, which was absolutely brilliant, was a Rough Cut for a book that isn’t due to be printed until July of this year, 2009.

These are the four books I would recommend on the process of taking a digital file from creation to print:

1. Inkjet Tips and Techniques An Essential Printing Resource for Photographers by Andrew Darlow
2. Mastering Digital Color: A Photographer’s and Artist’s Guide to Controlling Color by David Saffir
3. Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications by Claudia McCue (this is a ‘Rough Cut’, due to be published in July 2009)
4. CMYK 2.0: A Cooperative Workflow for Photographers, Designers, and Printers by Rick McCleary

Safari Books Online cover many topics and are constantly expanding their library.  Searching their library is a really good way to find excellent books on different subjects.  And at the bottom of each book description they also include Amazon.com customer reviews, which is a really excellent way to gauge the relevance of a book to your needs.

Next, I’m going to read a book specifically on Digital Painting, “Photoshop Studio with Bert Monroy: Digital Painting” by Bert Monroy; then I’ll read a couple of books about digital SLR cameras, and about the one we have in particular, so that I can competently take photos of the artwork.

After that, well… I’ll see if there’s anything else relevant to my art goals.

"Fisherman's Bastion, Budapest" egg tempera painting by Nat Wildish

I hope to have most of the research of this type finished within the next month.  And then I can really get to work on the art, which is, after all, the most enticing part.  I hope that sharing some of my process in researching and in particular the books I found on printing can be of help to you.  If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions I’d be very happy to hear them.