CPSA District Chapter 210 San Jose, CA, Blog: Highlights of November 2014 Meeting

Our November 2014 meeting was held at the Bothwell Arts Center in Livermore, CA. Since many of our current members are in the Livermore/Pleasanton area, we'll try to hold our meetings here for the foreseeable future. It's a great facility with plenty of space and seating, and it's even art-focused.

Our members have been busy! We had lots of recognition to give:

Gemma Gylling: Best in Show in Colors of Humanity Art Gallery Animals Exhibition
Ranjini Venkatachari: Invited into Ampersand Art Supply’s 20th Anniversary Invitational
Gemma Gylling and Denise Howard: included in “CP Treasures Vol. III” from Ann Kullberg
Denise Howard: included in “Strokes of Genius 7” from North Light Books
Denise Howard: finalist in Richeson 75 “Animals, Birds & Wildlife”
The winners in our chapter show: Denise Howard (1st, and Hon. Mention), Gemma Gylling (2nd), Chris Swetlin (3rd)
Andrea Myers, Gemma Gylling for helping with show reception
Everyone who participated in ArtWalk: Phil Dean, Gemma Gylling, Denise Howard, Maryann Kot, Vivi Leon, Andrea Myers, Joanne Spurr

I read aloud the nice letter we received from national ways and means director Melissa Miller Neece thanking us for contributing funds to the District Chapters Award for Excellence in this year’s International Exhibition. I also read aloud the nice handwritten thank-you card from the winner of that award, Paul Van Heest. (You can see his winning piece here: http://cpsa.org/coloredpencilartists/22/awards2014.html )

We made some plans for 2015!

Next meeting:
Saturday, Feb. 21, 2015 at the Bothwell Arts Center in Livermore.
Workshop:
    Back by popular request, we will host another two-day workshop by Gemma Gylling!
    Saturday and Sunday April 18-19, 2015
    Bothwell Arts Center, Livermore
    Subject: Wolf

There was also discussion about the possibility of having a one-day workshop in the fall.

Anniversary:
2015 marks the 20th anniversary of the founding our chapter, so we’d like to do something special to celebrate in observance. A suggestion was made for a bocce ball outing since it requires no special skill or fitness and allows for socializing and dining. Campo di Bocce has locations in Livermore and Los Gatos, and a couple of our members have connections at them, so they volunteered to check into it.

The Fun Stuff!

Steve Gray is a Livermore photographer who does a lot of digital image capture and fine art reproduction, including for a couple of pleased members of our chapter. He gave a very interesting one-hour presentation about the factors that affect the fidelity of a digital image to the original artwork, and the additional factors that affect the fidelity of a print to the original artwork. Color models, color spaces, printer profiles, calibration of monitors and scanners, type of paper being printed upon, He also covered the basics of making your own digital captures via scanner or camera. He had examples of a particular artwork reproduced from the same digital file on the same computer and the same printer but on different papers. Some of the key takeaways:

Keep your digital image in as high-resolution of a format as you can for as long as you can—don’t throw away pixel data that you can’t get back. RAW or TIFF are best. JPG is worst because every time you open and re-save the file it recompresses the data, throwing away more information
For prints, the type of paper used can make a big difference in how closely the reproduction matches the original
Always keep backups of your digital image copies, preferably off-site like in a safe deposit box.
DPI (dots per inch) and PPI (pixels per inch) are not the same thing. DPI refers to inkjet printing, PPI is for computer screens.

Steve was very free with information about how to do it all yourself; it just depends on how deeply into the technical aspects you want to get and how much of your time you’re willing to spend on it instead of creating more art. If you’re interested in having Steve digitally capture and/or reproduce your artwork, his contact info is: Steve Gray, St. John Imaging, stjohnimaging@gmail.com, (925) 292-5686

After Steve’s presentation, we viewed the CPSA DVD slideshow of this year’s International Exhiibition and award winners as well as the award winners from last year’s Explore This. We applauded as the works of several of our several chapter members appeared on the screen!

We finished with “Show and Tell”, 11 drawings in states from in-progress to framed. There was a wide variety of subjects and techniques on display and we all learned from the discussions. For example, Mike Purdy is experimenting with grisaille, which involves making a monochromatic underpainting to settle the value range and then adding colors over the top.

Here are some photos from the meeting, courtesy of secretary Mike Purdy. See you in February!