Under A Hawk’s Eye View

DweezelJazz — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:03:17 +0000

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

DweezelJazz Art Blog » Song For Jasmine

Under A Hawk’s Eye View