Lettering

[Laurence Finston]

It will be awhile before I've pressed the backgrounds and photographed them using the photo stand, so I thought I'd try using the photos I've got for color replacement. I think the watercolor looks good but without having really examined the photos, I don't see any difference between the gouache and the construction paper. Of course, there are a lot more colors of gouache than of construction paper or photo board.

As a temporary result, it seems to me that watercolor and encaustic are more promising approaches.

[Laurence Finston]

I bought myself a DIN A4 scanner so I can scan whatever I want to at home. I don't want to scan anything with materials that could rub off on the glass at the library and I haven't yet asked about the possibility of cleaning it before and after I use the scanners there.

The DIN A3 scanner they have there is very large and I wouldn't have room for one at the present time. In addition, they're expensive whereas my A4 scanner wasn't and is also very compact and light.
So I tore some sheets of the heavy watercolor paper down to a size somewhat smaller than A4. I have some A4 watercolor paper somewhere so I didn't want to go to the extra trouble of measuring and tearing or cutting this paper down to exactly A4.

The color in these examples is Old Holland watercolor, dioxazine mauve. It came from a tablet rather than a tube this time. I was looking for something else and found this, which I had forgotten I had.

This time, I made two backgrounds so I save one with just one coat and put a second coat on the other, which I did this morning. It's almost dry now and I think it looks better than the version with one coat. However, that one might be useful, if I want the paler appearance for something, so I might as well save it.

In this small format, the paper curled up a lot when wet, which tended to cause more of the accidental effects, where the color concentrates in particular areas. In this case, that's something I wanted. These kinds of accidental effects are one of the reasons people use watercolors in the first place.

As the photos show, I prefer to use a whole palette for a single color, where possible, especially when using tablets. With a tube, you can put a blob of paint on the palette and put the tube away, but the tablet has to be accessible and can easily be contaminated by other colors, as myriads of yellow tablets in the watercolor boxes of schoolchildren can attest.

I use three largish jars of distilled water for rinsing out and wetting my brushes while working, labelled 1, 2 and 3. 1 has the dirtiest water in it. If I want to use the brush for a different color, I'll first wipe it off on newspaper or some other piece of paper, then I'll rinse it in 1, followed by 2 (somewhat dirty water) and 3 (pretty clean water). As the amount of paint in the jars increases, I pour out 1, pour the water from 2 into 1, from 3 into 2, rinse out 3 and put fresh water in it.

For diluting the paint, I have a little plastic bottle (originally for oil and purchased at a building supply store) with a brass tube than can be screwed closed and also containing distilled water.

Photo number 8 shows a "giant flower press". That is the translation of "Riesen-Blumenpresse". I bought it at a store that sells ecologically-friendly textiles, cleaning products, etc., that also has creative toys for children. There are book presses that work according to the same principle. It's too small for DIN A3 but more than large enough for the small backgrounds, so I decided to give it a try.

N.b.: The hyphen in "Riesen-Blumenpresse" indicates that it is a giant press for flowers, whereas "Riesenblumen-Presse" would be a press for giant flowers and "Riesenblumenpresse" (without question also a possibility) would be ambiguous. Obviously, this press would also be suitable for giant flowers, unless we're talking about extraterrestrial ones that could consume an entire city block, for example.

This is something that I could easily make myself, given the space, but the convenience of just being able to buy it outweighed any savings I might have made by doing it myself.

It came with screws and wing nuts that didn't appear particularly robust to me and there were no washers, so I bought some carriage bolts, nuts and washers to replace them. The original screws were for a straight screwdriver which seems to me like an accident waiting to happen.

I have a socket set somewhere but I don't know where and it isn't that great anyway. It was a premium from somewhere. So, I bought myself some sockets and a handle in screwdriver form. I also only had a single 10mm normal wrench, or only one I could find, so I bought myself a second one. (Any excuse will do for buying tools.) The new setup is much safer and effective than the original one.

The next photos show the steps of putting the background with a single coat into the press, where I will leave it for a few hours. This is the first time I've used the press and I'm quite eager to see the result.

[Laurence Finston]

I took the one-coat version out of the press and I think it looks fine. I could probably get it flatter by moistening the paper first but then I would have to let everything dry after taking it out. I think it's good enough. I'll just have to tape it down or mount it with photo corners before photographing it. In the scanner, it will be pressed flat anyway. I also think it will eventually flatten when it goes into a folder with other drawings and paintings.

The third and fourth photos show the two-coat version before I put it into the press. I think the painting turned out really well and I think I'm onto something here. I also think the results would look better with a better camera or a scanner. I can try out the scanner when I feel like installing the software.

[Laurence Finston]

I've made a couple more watercolor backgrounds, this time in A4. Then, I photographed the watercolor backgrounds again, because I currently don't have access to the photos and scans I made before. Then I made another couple of examples of titles using the watercolors for the color replacement.

It's just a test because I want to photograph them properly using the camera stand and with adequate lighting. I think the purple background looks good but the letters don't really. I think it would be better to use gouache or construction paper.

The company Canson makes high quality colored paper which is widely available in stores here. I have a few sheets of it, but not in the stronger colors I would need for this purpose. I think I'll just use gouache.

[Laurence Finston]

It took some fiddling to get the color replacement to work in GIMP and it took me several tries for each of the two last examples. The image with the text had to be shrunk because I'd done it for A3 whereas the backgrounds were smaller than A4. Then, it had to be "posterized" to get rid of the antialiasing. If you forget this and you add a layer with a watercolor image, you can't fix it and have to go back to an earlier stage. I could have avoided this by having MetaPost output PNG files but I didn't want to bother making the necessary changes and rerunning MetaPost.

The attached image is something interesting (in a kind of "psychedelic" way) that occurred when I'd done something wrong. I don't really remember what I did wrong, but if I could reproduce it, this effect might be useful for something.

[Laurence Finston]

This technique of using masks and overlays with GIMP is really the digital emulation of the way animation used to be done by hand with cels and backgrounds. It's possible to perform many of these functions using the command-line tools in the ImageMagick package as well. In the long run, that might be a better way to do it, unless I can figure out how to automate the process in GIMP, which should be possible using what they call "Script-Fu" (actually, the built-in Scheme interpreter). Scheme is a dialect of LISP and other programs have LISP interpreters running in them, such as Emacs and AutoCAD.

In pre-color Hollywood cartoons, there are often beautifully rendered backgrounds in black, white and gray tones. After color, they started using watercolor and many of the backgrounds are also very beautifully done.

The background was opaque. Anything that didn't move in a scene went on the background and everything that was animated went on a cel. The name "cel" comes from "celluloid", but that was a misnomer, because cels were never made of this material. I believe they eventually settled on acetate, but I'd have to look this up.

I was surprised to find out that cels (and cel paint) are still available. I thought that they would be obsolete. They had many disadvantages. They were not completely transparent, not everything would stick to it and the cel paint didn't have particularly good working properties and the colors available were limited. Since they weren't completely transparent, you could only have so many in a stack, because otherwise the resulting image would be too dark. I think the limit was about 3 or 4. In addition, if you wanted colors to be consistent, you had to use different ones to represent the same color on the resulting photographed image depending on where in the stack a particular cel was.

There was a certain discrepancy between the appearance of the watercolor backgrounds and the animated figures in cel paint. At the Warner Bros. studio, they started using gouache for the backgrounds to make things more consistent. This is a big part of the characteristic look of W.B. cartoons.

Using the computer, none of this is a problem anymore. You can use whatever kind of paint or other medium you want and can combine a (theoretically) unlimited number of layers. There are no limits on what kind of paint or other medium you can use for the animated figures.

I do feel a bit of nostalgia for the days of 35mm cine film. I might be less nostalgic if I'd ever filmed anything using actual film. I do appreciate being able to see the results of my work immediately without having to send film in to be developed and wait for it to come back. And editing with a scissors and a roll of tape is surely much more tedious, time-consuming and error-prone than doing it digitally on the computer.

[Laurence Finston]

More backgrounds. The red is Schmincke Horadam gouache, cadmium red medium and the the yellow is Schmincke HKS Designer's gouache, Indian yellow.
I threw out the tinted water on the right side of the palette with the red paint and in the middle of the palette with the yellow paint, but I've saved the remaining paint in the other compartments. When the paintings are dry, I'll use it to touch them up or for a second coat. The red might only need touching up but the yellow will need a second coat. For one thing, the cadmium red is opaque and the Indian yellow is semi-transparent, for another, Horadam is better quality paint than HKS.

The latter is cheaper and specifically for repro. It's presumably less heavily pigmented and more likely to contain additives. I don't remember why I bought it. Probably because I just wanted to try out gouache or wanted it for a specific purpose. I do remember liking it and deciding to use it more. However, I ended up not using it very much, although I do like it. They probably conform to some color standard, most likely Pantone. This is important for commercial and manufacturing but completely irrelevant for my projects. However, I'll try to use it up rather than buying even more paint.

As you can see, I use different palettes for different colors, as mentioned above. Another important factor in not ruining your paints is the proper way of handling tubes. With tubes, there's a right way and a wrong way. I always wipe off the threads of a tube of paint with a clean rag before I screw the top back on (which I do immediately after taking some paint out). That is, I always do this now; I clearly did not always do this, because I keep finding tubes of paint I haven't opened in awhile with paint caked on the threads. Depending on the paint, it can be a pain in the neck to get off.

I always remove the paint with a clean palette knife. If you scrape the end of the tube over a palette with other colors, you're likely to contaminate the paint at the end of the tube. Pigment often has very strong tinting power, so even a small particle can cause a smear. If it's watercolor, you may ruin your painting this way, because watercolor is a rather unforgiving medium in that way; it's virtually impossible to make corrections. In addition, you're likely to get paint on the threads and the end of the tube. I wipe the threads off anyway, but I don't want to have to wipe paint off the end of the tube, too. It's also not a precise way of getting the amount of paint you want, so there is just no reason to do it.

[Laurence Finston]

Another important point about tubes is that they should never be rolled up from the bottom, but rather flattened. If you roll them up, they will eventually split and the paint will be exposed to the air. If it's gouache or watercolor, it can be salvaged; all you have to do is dissolve it in water. However, if it's oil, once it's dried you can't reconstitute it.

[Laurence Finston]

Further up, there are a couple of photos with letters for the title "April Showers". I've spent some time today working on titles for a planned music video. The song "April Showers" is in the public domain, so I don't have to obtain permission to use it, which is a somewhat thorny problem for works not in the public domain.

I'd like to have animated raindrops in the video. I was hoping to get further along tonight but I've had about enough. Like so many other things, it's more time-consuming and tedious than I thought it would be.

The attached files show how drawings may be parameterized using MetaPost. In the PDF, the drawings in the middle and at the left are done "by hand". On the basis of them, I wrote a macro (`raindrop') that takes several arguments and uses them as parameters to determine the raindrop shape. I used this macro for the drawing on the right.

The next step is to use loops to animate multiple raindrops falling and changing shape at the same time. Using the technique illustrated in my "Animation" thread, I can set the rate of fall and the rate of change for every raindrop completely independently.

I've read something about the question of whether objects of different weights fall at the same rate or not, but I don't remember what the answer is. I'll have to look it up. I think the acceleration due to gravity is a constant, independent of the weight of the object, but I'm very shaky on this. On the other hand, it's supposed to be entertainment and not a demonstration of the laws of physics.

[Laurence Finston]

This is harder than I thought it would be. The PDF file shows examples of using the macro `raindrop' with different parameters. In the figures in the top line, starting from the third one from the left, the height parameter, which controls the distance of the top of the raindrop shape from the center of the circle used to generate it, is varied from .5cm to 2cm and in the second row, the value determining the point on the circle where the curved lines meet it is varied from 5 to 5.5. The circle has 8 points, so this value (5+x)/8 of the way around the circle going counter-clockwise from the point at the right along a horizontal line passing through the center. The curved line is found on the left side and then reflected about the axis R_2R_1.

If the values are chosen poorly, the resulting curve has one or more unwanted loops. If more than one parameter is changed at a time, it's hard to understand what's going on, so this has to be done gradually.

I like the last three in the second row.

It would certainly be easier just to draw raindrops freehand using a light table, but that's not really the point.