A few (well, one or two) readers asked if it might be possible to buy prints of my paintings. So I decided to go for it. I used my old Leica with a wide-angle lens and a great (cheap at $39) 1000-watt halogen lamp from Ace Hardware. The photo shop scanned my negatives at 2000 dpi to give me some fairly hefty files.
And I uploaded them to Imagekind.com; they gave me a free account as rudy.imagekind.com — with no www, how modern, how Web 2.0. And now you can order nice big prints of my paintings, fairly reasonably priced, on fancier paper if you like, or even with a frame.
What does this picture mean? Well, I wrote a little comment on each painting on the Imagekind site, and you can read my notes on my paintingsall together in my gallery feed, which is kind of nice.
Not to go all commercial on you, I also revamped my personal paintings page with bigger and better images than before with one of those cute thumbnail scrollbars that Photoshop can make. I like how colorful this page is.
Buddha says check it out. Tomorrow I’m sending off my negatives for a 4000 dpi scan to make even bigger image files in case anyone wants to print a really big poster of one of my paintings—I should have the bigger files on Imagekind in a couple of weeks.
February 28th, 2007 at 1:39 am
Selling the prints is a great idea. I want some for sure!
Is it possible to get them signed?
The colors of the prints on Imagekind look a bit muted compared
to the images of your paintings you have previously posted.
Maybe the Gamma/Saturation needs adjusting?
I preferred the brighter previous images.
February 28th, 2007 at 7:45 am
I hear you, Alex. I just spent some time further tweaking the images in Photoshop and indeed I can make some of them pop better than they presently do. More saturation is a good idea up to a point—the down side of dialing up saturation is that you start clipping colors and reducing subtly textured areas to flat fields. In fact I think I might have gone too far just now, sigh. I put the altered images on the Rudy’s Paintings site just now, but now I’m bugged about the clipping, so I’m gonna redo them from scratch before changing what’s on Imagekind. (By the way, if you looked at Rudy’s Paintings before and go back to it, you need to press F5 on each image to see the newly tweaked more garish version).
Re: Imagekind, I still need to get a higher-res scan of my images in any case so there’s not so much point in Photoshopping the images further till the rescan, and before I send off for the rescan what I really need to do is to rephotograph them with slide film instead of negative film and with a somewhat different lighting set-up, the lights were too strongly to one side before. Photography is like computer hacking but worse. In all honesty, I’d advise that you hold off on actually buying a print till the end of March.
In any case, today I have to go over the copy edits for Postsingular.
As for signatures, I’m not sure how to do that. It’d be a hassle mailing the thing back and forth. Maybe I could make up some little stickers that I sign and you stick on…
February 28th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
I’m enjoying looking over your virtual shoulder and making out what’s on your bookshelf . . .
February 28th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Rudy, I bring you Zimmerman and Geisel, two great tastes that taste great together.