[Laurence Finston]

I had a very difficult time getting this to work. These are two drawings from my "Midsummer Night's Dream" project, Bottom and Titania (in case you couldn't guess), placed on top of watercolor backgrounds. After a lot of trial and error I finally succeeded but I haven't completely understood the process.

The problem is that color replacement works on all pixels of a given color, so it was difficult to avoid changing ones in the foreground or background, when trying to make the masks with either the foreground or background sections transparent. Ultimately it worked by creating a selection and only operating on it. However, sometimes what I did worked and sometimes it didn't and I'm not sure why.

I referred to a manual on GIMP that I bought but it would make things much easier if I would sit down and really spend some time reading the documentation.

I bought a DIN A4 scanner, which wasn't very expensive. It will actually scan items that are somewhat larger than A4. Scanning at the library I didn't want to get the glass of the scanner dirty so I scanned using transparent pockets for anything that I thought might rub off and that caused streaks on the scanned image. They have book scanners there with a camera above and pointing down at the items to be scanned. I'll try that for the backgrounds I did in A3.

The blue of the watercolor background in the second picture is quite different from its appearance in real life. I don't know what the cause is, it could be the scanner or my computer. Really reproducing color accurately is a science in itself and probably still requires special equipment that in turn needs to be calibrated. I don't think this would be realistic for me.

On the other hand, the ink I used for the drawings (Rohrer und Klingner tusche, which is manufactured by Schmincke), reproduces very well. For the skin color in the drawing of Titania, I used air brush ink. I did these drawings around 2003 or 2005 and except for the white ink and the mixtures I made using white, which dried up, all of the ink is as good as new.