Hi everyone! Jen Perena here with a quick Monday morning note about my progress over the last week. Unfortunately I have no photos to accompany this article, but there has been progress!
Over the last week I painted more and am almost completely done with the hand watercoloring of the kallitype prints in my vegetation series. My goal had been to finish all of the painting by Saturday, but there was just too much going on at work, and too many interesting distractions with the ROC holiday village, Christmas markets and winter activities all around town last week and weekend….and…shiny object! I had to find a balance…
So, I applied at least a base layer of color to the majority of the images, and then on Sunday morning, I showed the entire body of work, at it is, in progress, to a group of Artist friends, to get their feedback and input. And it was very fruitful!
My hopes going into the session were the following:
- Decide which 10 images of each theme (winter and vegetation) would be the ‘final cut’ for the exhibit (driven by the fact that I have 20 frames to work with) – out of the roughly 14-15 images in each theme grouping; it was hard to decide and I might end up with 24 total images instead….
- Get a rough idea of how to sequence the images in each theme; we achieved the ‘rough idea,’ but need to see them all matted to really finalize it since the prints are a mix of landscape and portrait formats…
- Get feedback on the hand coloring – some of which is more bold and some of which is more subtle, and then determine if making all of the prints uniform is important or not…some liked the bold, some liked the subtle….we did not come to a perfect agreement on this topic….
- Decide how to mat all the prints: cut tight mats to the image dimensions? Cut larger mats to expose the brush strokes at the edges? Skip cutting the mats altogether and instead affix the images to the top of the mat board using double sided acid free tape? I think we are going with tight mats framed to the size of the negatives – it will look neater, more traditional, more ‘standard’, and will hide the edges on a few of the prints where the brush strokes are more of a distraction than interesting…
While we accomplished everything I had hoped, there are still some decisions I need to make on my own, and that means a bit more work, so I am back at it this week.
Next goals: scan all of the images towards the creation of a photo book or zine, come up with titles for each piece, and then begin the cutting of the mats….
Stay tuned! I’ll post more photos next week!