Thursday, 11-Jan-18 21:31:39 CET

Ibex in the Nubian desert - 11 January 2018

Tonight it was my first aquarelle painting evening with the Aquarelmere club. I usually don't blog about my evenings at Aquarelmere but perhaps I will that change this year.

It was the first time I used the block that I received as a birthday present from the club when we celebrated my fifties birthday. Arches orange, rough grain, 300 g per square meter, 14 by 20 inches, pure cotton! This block has 20 papers, so now there are 19 left.

The theme for tonight was oasis or desert. I went for an animal in the desert. Searched around and found this image of the ibex in the Nubian desert.

The sky I painted with wet-in-wet technique, and the foreground I painted with wet-on-dry technique. The white I preserved by not painting on it.

It turned out quite well.

The artists tonight were Rita, Petra, Hetty, Hanneke, Ina and me.

Here the story would end but a couple of days later I came across this photo, and it occurred to me that the white was not as white as it could be. Of course, I took a picture of this painting with my mobile phone, and it is an old Samsung Galaxy S4. Even so, I decided to give this image a second change, so I loaded it into Gimp and used the Colors>Levels... tool. In there I could see a histogram where the right edge was not touching the right side of the diagram. Then I dragged the little handle of the right side towards the beginning of the histogram. This trick is doing wonders, but there it does not end. Then there is a "Pick white tool" that I selected and then pointed to a white spot in my image, and that is it. The colors are matching my perception of this picture exactly!