#186 - Printer/Scanner/Copier

1 Family Photo, 1 Dad-Joke, Many Highlights

Family Photo:
Scanner

Calvin and Lawrence figured out how to make copies using Grandpa’s flatbed scanner.

Fortunately, Grandpa encourages their artistic endeavors.

At first, they made copies of their notes and drawings...occasionally an extra coloring sheet here or there. Then last week they figured out copied things on the flatbed scanner didn’t have to be flat.

Calvin made a copy of his hands. He wrote, “thes are my hands,” in blue ink on his copy of his hands. Then he made six more copies of that copy and taped them up around the house. I pointed out that ‘These’ ends in an ‘e’ and he went around the house updating the spelling on his six hand copy copies.

Calvin and Lawrence also made copies of their trains. That’s not so surprising—after hands, trains are probably the most likely non-flat thing Calvin and Lawrence would copy. It was surprising to watch them mark up their copied trains. They used highlighters to make the train colors pop off the page. They used Sharpies to add train modifications and speech bubbles. Then they taped their train copies to the walls.

It’s fun having their copier art taped to the walls. It’s like living in our own little Andy Warhol Museum.

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Dad Jokes:
Toner

Source: Skeleton Claw​

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Highlights:
Copier

​Photography Workflow by Simon Sarris​

Go collect images from photographers you really admire, and compare with your own. What’s different about their photos and yours? Try to make your edits look like their edits, if possible. You might find out what’s missing from your edits, or it might make you realize something is missing altogether from your composition.

​This kind of comparing-with and attempting-to-copy the artists you admire is one of the best ways to learn. If you feel like your work is “off” then it’s the first thing you should do. It’s somewhat shunned these days, where people think of comparing yourself to others and intentionally copying as plagiarism or un-originality, but such an attitude is a huge mistake. Almost all great painters learned by copying, sometimes directly copying, the works of the masters that came before them, and this way of working is useful for getting yourself onto the right track. After a while, once your own work improves, you will become somewhat naturally dissatisfied and move into making your own edits, and develop a personal style. But it’s hard to simply become good from scratch, so you should start with an aim towards making your work like the work of those you admire. I hope that makes sense.

​Copy What You Like by Paul Graham​

How do you avoid copying the wrong things? Copy only what you genuinely like.
...
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It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you’re impressed with. One trick is to ignore presentation. Whenever I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how much would I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no idea who painted it? If you walk around a museum trying this experiment, you’ll find you get some truly startling results. Don’t ignore this data point just because it’s an outlier.

​The McPhee method by James Somers​

I liked the sound of the method, and I liked the products of it. So I just did my best to copy what Howarth said McPhee did. It’s basically the process I’ve used ever since.

​Are You Serious? by Visakan Veerasamy​

Hokusai was serious. Here’s him talking about his paintings after ~70 years of working on them:
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​“From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own.”

​The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Hokusai. Painted at age 70.

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iamJoshKnox Highlights:

Echo
by Christina Rossetti

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