30 Jan--1 Feb I took a 3-day watercolor workshop with Tim Saternow, under the auspices of the New England Watercolor Society. The workshop was held at the Guild of Boston Artists on Newbury Street. These are the pieces I painted based on photos I'd taken in 2012 in Latvia. Both were scenes from Rīga, Latvia, when I was there for the month of March 2012 during my Projekt NOASS art residency: one of the famous Cat House in Rīga's Old Town (Vecrīga), the other of a wooden windmill moved from the province of Zemgale to the Latvian Ethnographic Open-Air Museum on the east side of the city.
Both of these pieces are too big to fit on my already large (12" x 17") scanner, so I scanned each in 3 passes; then I stitched the pieces together in Photoshop. Since whatever side of the scan "sticks out" is likely to be distorted by curling up from under the lid of the scanner, I cropped each scan on the side in question -- both sides, in the case of the middle scan. I recently learned -- by accident, really -- a good way to figure out how to overlap the layers: Change the mode of the adjoining layers from Normal to Multiply. This way, it's easy to see how the layers overlap, including while rotating one of the layers to line up properly with the other. But both layers have to be reset to Normal before being merged, and all layers need to be Normal before flattening (i.e. merging into one single layer for the whole document). I did this when scanning the pencils before the workshop, and I did it today with the color scans.
