Thursday, December 28, 2006

Sleepless Woman with Moon and Birds (1983)

It required some thinking before I could remember the name of this drawing. It wasn't until around 1987 that I began to write down the names that I gave to my drawings and paintings. Once again, I am finding that looking back at my work is a good exercise of my memory. 

This drawing has a connection to a poem I wrote in the early 1980's called "A Nation of Sleepless Women," which I posted yesterday. I was disappointed in the way the color of the image came through the first time I uploaded it because it had a cold blue look. The true image has much warmer blues. All of the colors are warmer, and even the black area is a warmer black. So, I went into iPhoto to see if I could remedy that. I clicked on "adjustments" and began playing with the brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, sharpness and exposure. I even discovered how to straighten the photo! What a revelation! The only thing I couldn't adjust to my satisfaction was the color up against the woman's face. The red near the woman's face in the first uploaded image is more like the original red. In the original image on paper, it is a red with more blue in it than orange. Of course, seeing a reproduction is not the same as seeing a drawing, but I got as close as I could to the spirit of the original drawing in the second uploaded image.

Just to see what it would look like, I made it into a black and white image.
 

2 comments:

Loren said...

Let me tell you, it gets way more exciting if you decide you want to make an accurate PRINT of your images.

I have a top-of-the-line Epson printer, and I still haven't satisfactorily printed a picture that required reproducing flesh colors.

am said...

That process of adjusting colors with a computer is fascinating and engrossing, isn't it?

It brings out a creativity that wants to fine tune in the realm of impossibility.