Photo by Arty Smokes

So the paintings are finished and ready to go to new homes and you want to record your work for posterity. How to do this professionally at home without needing studio lights.

What you will need

The photography setup

Wait until your painting dries.

You will get the best photos of dry or nearly dry oil paintings. If the oil is still wet, it will shine in areas and the oil remaining in the painting will reflect light differently than the dry areas of the painting.

Go outside on a bright overcast day.
This is crucial. I've tried bright sun. I've tried shade. I've tried bright days and dull days and I swear every combination in between. I can say from experience that the best conditions to get beautiful rich colour and no glare on your painting is a bright overcast day. What's that? Basically a sunny day with lots of clouds. Colours around you should appear normal, not dull. Shadows should not exist or if they do they have soft edges. Once the edges of the shadows turn hard, it's too bright and you will get glare spots on your paintings.

Position the painting at 45 degrees to the sky, facing the sun (ie north here in Australia, or south for most everyone else).
I think both perfectly upright and laying flat on the ground also work too, but this is the setup I found was ideal for me. Place a sturdy support (helps eliminate shake from small and not so small breezes) at 45 degrees to the sky, cover with a black cloth to reduce color interference, and put the painting on this.

Point the camera straight at the painting.
Fill the camera view with the painting as much as possible. Use every pixel possible! Remember to tilt the camera slightly down to match the angle that the artwork is leaning - this will help minimize distortion. Check in the viewfinder to see if all the sides of your painting are parallel to the viewing edge. If not, your camera is at a different angle than the painting. Fiddle until you get this right. Also, remember to set the tripod up so that your shadow is not on the painting as you stand over it!

Camera tips

• Use the largest image setting possible for your camera to get the highest resolution images
• Set your camera's ISO to its lowest native setting to ensure the least amount of image 'noise' - aim for 50 ISO
• If you can, lock the SLR mirror up as this will reduce camera shake as the shutter fires
• Use a self timer if you can to eliminate any camera shake as you press the shutter button
• Always bracket exposures - huh? Take shots slightly on either side of what your camera says is the ideal exposure as it's not always right for each picture
• Don't rely on auto focus to get it right, sometimes a small manual tweak does the trick

Post processing in your digital darkroom, aka Photoshop

Once your shots are off your camera and on your computer, compare them at full size for colour, focus/blur, contrast etc to choose the best one.

If none of the images are quite right, take the time to re-shoot your painting. This is your archive. It's worth getting right. Once the paintings have gone to their new homes it's next to impossible to borrow them back to re-shoot them.

With editing, often you will find that a small increase in contrast is all they need. Sometimes a small amount of colour correcting can go a long way, too. This is where that grey card shot comes in extremely handy. I'm not going to reinvent the wheel - download this free and super helpful kick ass pdf by one Michael King on how to use a grey card to colour correct artwork.

Always save your images as tiff or psd for maximum information retention. Only save them as a jpeg for emailing once all edits have been done as the jpg format is so small because it throws out fine detail information. Always keep a tiff or psd version somewhere so you can archive your image without any loss of information and re-edit in the future.

Useful links to peruse

http://artlinkswap.org/photographing_art.shtml

http://emptyeasel.com/2007/01/19/how-to-photograph-your-artwork-for-a-portfolio-or-the-internet/

http://michaelking.ca/wp-content/uploads/pdf/Grey_Card_Tutorial.pdf

More art technique articles

This article is one in an ongoing series of technical articles for artists, all archived together and accessible from here. The topics range from details on materials, to the business of art, to specific art techniques. Please make use of this resource.

Fresh. Versatile. Filling. Zesty.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm acrylic on paper. The paper is no ordinary paper, it is textured Hahnemuhle 300 gsm 100% alpha cellulose which is acid-free fibre of vegetable origin.

Inspired by bowls of swirling tangled noodles, Chinese 'auspicious clouds' and the jaw dropping mirror mosaic 'Under the Sea'' 2007 by Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, seen here in b&w.

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

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The meatless meals recipe

A warming and filling meal of fresh, uncooked ingredients in the middle of winter can be somewhat of a challenge. Sesame noodles to the rescue! As long as you julienne all your veg, this is the dish for getting a dose of raw vege vitamin power to pep you up and smash the winter carb fest routine. All the chopping does take a bit of time, but hey, that's why you gather everyone around to help out.

400g dry noodles such as soba, somen, ramen or similar
400g julienned veges such as cabbage, beetroot, snowpeas, broccoli, carrot, parsnip, leafy greens - these can either be raw or blanched

3 tablespoons sesame oil
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup soy sauce
splash of water - just enough to make the sauce mixable
3 tablespoons tahini
1 tablespoon peanut butter
1 pinch chilli powder
1/2 teaspoon grated fresh ginger
1/8 cup lime or lemon juice
zest of 1/2 an orange
2 spring onions, finely chopped
4 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds
30g fresh coriander, roughly chopped


Cook the noodles. Drain and rinse under cold water to cool them down a little.
Toast (dry roast) the sesame seeds if they are untoasted.
Put sesame oil, garlic, soy sauce, sugar, water, tahini, peanut butter, chilli powder and ginger in a small pot or frypan and heat gently to dissolve the sugar and take the edge off the garlic. Leave this sauce to cool.
Chop all the veges and blanch them if you don't want to eat them raw.
When all the above parts of the dish are ready, add the lime/lemon juice, orange zest and spring onion to the sauce and mix well.
Mix the noodles and sauce thoroughly.
Serve into bowls and top with the veges.  Sprinkle with sesame seeds and coriander.

Makes a lot of food for 4.

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Food painting artwork

30 x 30cm oil on canvas. This is one of those artworks where straightaway I had a really strong idea of what I wanted to do. Trying to get that idea to actually freaking work was really, really hard. I now know all sorts of ways not to try and take a print from a halved cabbage. Sometimes it's best to keep pushing at an idea until it resolves. Sometimes it's best to let it go and simmer in the unconscious for a while. After spending an entire day trying to take a print from a cabbage and sketching out variation upon variation on my idea, I decided to let it sit. In the meantime, it dawned on me where the idea was stemming from, and knowing this, the image resolved itself.  So a shoutout to cartoonist Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void for the inspiration for this rather abstract line based piece and no cabbage print in sight after all.

By the way, all the food painting artwork is available to own in the Official Art Store.

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The meatless meals recipe

Cabbage rolls are a common and very popular dish throughout eastern europe. This recipe is  adapted from a cabbage rolls recipe I used to make quite often, until I became fed up with the finicky rolling process. So now I make unrolls. Basically the same ingredients. Very similar method. No effort required. And way more flavour than you would expect from cabbage.

After a bit of sleuthing I believe this recipe to be of Turkish origin. I'm pretty sure I copied the ingredients list on the grounds the recipe 'looked interesting' from a library book I borrowed at least 10 years ago. I didn't note the details of this book at the time. The recipe has gone through quite a few changes to end up in this form - it's now vegetarian, the rice flavourings have been added and it's been adjusted to work as 'unrolls'. However the spice combinations which work so well are exactly as I found them, and I would like to be able to give credit to the author of that book I borrowed all that time ago. Consider it done if I do manage to track that book down.

2 teaspoons butter

1/2 onion, diced

1 clove garlic, minced

1 1/4 cups frozen vege mince OR 3/4 cup dried TVP plus 3/4 cup water OR 1 1/2 cups cooked lentils

1 1/2 cups stock

1/2 teaspoon oregano

1/4 teaspoon thyme

3 pinches clove powder

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder

2 big pinches ground black pepper

1 bay leaf

2 tablespoons raisens or sultanas or currants

2 tablespoons / 45g slivered almonds

225g cabbage, finely sliced

440g tomato, chopped or pureed (perfect for excess tomatoes bottled in Autumn)

2 cups rice

4 tablespoons chopped fresh coriander - about 24g

zest and juice of 1/2 a lemon

Fry the onion and garlic in butter until golden.

Add mince/tvp/lentils, any extra water as directed and the stock. Then add the oregano, thyme, cloves, cinnamon, black pepper, bay leaf, raisens/sultanas/currants and almonds.

Stir well and simmer with the lid off until the liquid is gone, around 20 minutes.

Add tomato and cabbage and simmer for another 30 minutes (or more) until cabbage is nicely soft.

Meanwhile, cook the rice as you usually do. Drain and rinse if necessary.

Mix the coriander and lemon zest only (not juice) through the rice just before serving.

Serve the sauce on the rice and drizzle everything with the lemon juice.

Heartily feeds 4.

It was just an ordinary roadtrip over christmas to visit family. Something many people do at this time of year. A 7 1/2 drive, about the driving time from London to Edinburgh or Portland OR to Eureka CA. So 15 hours there and back, taken over three days in total on good roads in great weather. Straightforward, one would assume. Uneventful. Dull.

Not so. 

We blasted our way through hoards of locusts so thick on the ground and in the air that it was impossible not to step on them in the hourly stops to clean the windscreen and administer mercy killings to the partly splattered. A radiator screen would have been a good idea had we known what we were to encounter, but at least we weren't on motorbikes!

The landscapes were captivating. Slow down. See through an artist's eyes:

We followed the South Australian coast road down to the Victorian border, driving through an area known as the Coorong. A marshy, salty, swampy place filled with such subtley coloured grasses and low scrubby plants that it was an eerily enchanting landscape.

The pink salt lakes stopped us in our tracks. Have you ever walked on a one inch thick crust of salt? I walk out into the pink water until the salt gives beneath my weight and cracks. Underneath was silty jet black warm mud.

We stopped to gaze on in admiration, from every possible angle, at the turquoise blue lake of Mount Gambier. Yes the lake really is that blue.

We encountered Australian beaches so typically Aussie they could have been cut and pasted from a Tourism Australia brochure. What the glossies don't say is that many of these beaches have rips and undertows too strong to be safe to swim in. But the colours, oh my!

And all throughout the drive were the iconic Australian paddock trees. Stately overseers of broadacre farming, all twisted, deformed and majestic and very dry. Wonderful silhouettes.

What beauty have you been driving on past lately?

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For all you fans of the simple tree, I have uploaded an entire collection of trees for you to use as reference material. I plan to sporadically add to this collection over time. Go create!