Thursday, June 19, 2014

Behind the Diner

Here's a sketch I did yesterday called "Behind the Diner," painted in casein on location in Red Hook, New York.
The basic process involved washing the color in transparently and then blocking the big shapes in with flat brushes, then finishing up with smaller round brushes.

Incidentally, the blue colors aren't this intense--has anyone noticed that Blogger seems to have installed an auto-color enhancer algorithm?
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EDIT: Thanks to Stuart for researching about the auto-enhance feature on Google plus (see comments). I went into Google Plus settings and deactivated that setting. Here's the image with the auto-enhance turned off, which is a lot closer to the original:

You can see a step-by-step sequence with more steps that you can click through, on my public Facebook page.

Here's more about the tools I was using:
Casein tube colors
1/4 inch flat brush 
Moleskine watercolor notebook
Waterman Phileas red fountain pen 

5 comments:

Stuart said...

I have also noticed the color correction, but I didn't do any research until now because I thought maybe I was just crazy. Apparently this is an issue related to google using an Auto-enhance feature through Google+ that is on by default (even if you don't use Google+). Here is an article about dealing with it: http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.ca/2013/10/stop-auto-enhance-being-applied-to-pictures-in-blogger.html

Unfortunately it basically means setting up a Google+ account.

James Gurney said...

Thanks, Stuart. I changed the setting and turned off Auto Enhance, and re-uploaded the image later in the post.

Arahmynta said...

In light of Google's "helpful" meddling, are there any other paintings that have been altered? I'd be interested in a post with just the images that were affected all reposted in a row, so that I could see them properly. Unless of course this has been happening for a long time, cause that would be a lot of work.

Stuart said...

On google plus, there may be an album corresponding to the whole blog (this is the case for me). I don't know if there is a faster way to find all the enhanced images, but if I click on one of the images, I can navigate through the album with the arrow keys and it will briefly show in the upper right corner "Enhanced" if that image was indeed enhanced. It can be turned off there. From my quick test though, that doesn't seem to update the image on the actual blog page.

David Teter said...

Yes, I had this problem a while back. It took me forever to find out why.
As far as I know you do have to go back and upload the image again in blog editor since it won't fix itself once the "Auto-enhance" has been turned off.
This is Googles sneaky way of making us have a Google + account. You can't turn it off without one.