Sunday, 10-Nov-19 21:03:14 CET

Eivor 10 November 2019

It is Sunday 10 November, and I am already at the studio de Stoker in Amsterdam. Today I went by car. There was so much maintenance on the train tracks today that I decided to go by car. It takes 35 minutes by car. A normal person would always go by car, but I think it is nice to commute by train and it is also environment-friendly. Not today, because of the train track maintenance.

To compensate for the loss of blog time on the train I loaded my keyboard and started writing a little before the session had started.

The artists today were Ron, Chef, Dick, Floor, Saskia, and me.

I took place in the corner. This was so that I could make some distance to the painting as I decided to do more often this season.

The model was Eivor from Norway. She was beautiful. Saskia rigged one lamp; I think it is equivalent to 500-watt, yellowish light from one side. That light only slightly lit Eivor from the position I could see her. On the other side, where Dick and I were standing, Saskia placed an incandescent light. The second light was a lot less yellow; it was lighting her from below.

It was a really long time ago that Dick came to paint with us. He said it was more than a year ago. He happily hummed with the music as he used to do. He got a deep voice. Funny enough, I did not get bothered by his humming as I was long ago.

It was a great pleasure to paint today, painters happiness indeed.

On the subject lighting I can add that I am still using my daylight lamp mounted on the easel. This way I can make the area around me darker if needed so that the model can get more dramatic light. Today if I had not had that lamp it would have been too dark in my corner. For me it was fine. The daylight lamp ensures that the colors I am using are perfectly suitable for viewing in daylight. If I were to paint in a yellow light then the painting ideally also had to be viewed in yellow light.

When I make a photo of the painting I make sure that the colors are transferred correctly. I always color correct against white. This is a function in GIMP that I am using. I can pick out a place in the painting that is supposed to be white, and then the colors of the painting are corrected according to that. For aquarelle paintings I always strive to keep a little bit of white in the painting. There only needs to be a tiny little spot. If there is no white spot then I can take the photo of the painting with a white paper next to it. That is what I did when making the photo of the painting I made of Eivor.

Next week Ron will not attend. I will try to get his spot. He was standing next to Floor. At that position, the chest of the model was to towards him, her head was straight to Floor, but she looked somewhere next to me. That means that from Ron's spot I will get a profile image of Eivor. That will be interesting. Traditionally the model will be at this studio at three sessions. Sometimes a model cannot come, etc., but that is how it is normally.

After the session I went home, driving my car. Emitting CO2. There was a beautiful sunset, but I had to have my hands on the steering wheel, so I could not take a photo of it.