February Update

In contrast to January, a fairly productive month for painting, February has been less so with only 5 paintings completed. The main reason for this was a shift in focus to conduct some overdue photographic maintenance.

Watercolour Paintings

Just five pieces completed: a Mexican Grackle, a bird that I saw daily while living in Mexico City a few years ago, and a Burchell’s Coucal, a bird seen on visits to Kruger National Park, South Africa. The other three were head shots on 12 cm x 15 cm sheets: Yellow-billed Hornbill, Little Bee-eater and White-crested Helmetshrike.

The 15 x 13 cm watercolour “headshots”:

Acrylic Paintings

I completed three pieces, of which two on heavyweight (1125 gm/m2) paper and one on canvas.

While I enjoy painting on the heavyweight paper I find that the advantage of this support, ie for packing and mailing, is outweighed by the quality of the paper which is inconsistent and seems prone to damage from dampness. Canvas supports, while needing more specialised packing, is more expensive to mail which impacts on the sale price. Longevity is important when investing in artwork so I shall, in future, paint and sell acrylic on canvas.

Photography

I have 160,000 images in my stock archive that have been captured since 2003 when I moved from film to digital camera work. A small percentage of these is on sale via Alamy but I need to:

manage my archives (and back-ups)
separate commercial images from reference images and delete the rest
place more images for sale via Alamy

This is time-consuming work but will allow me to reduce the expense of archiving. My initial target is to remove 50,000 images. Adobe Lightroom Classic is my main digital assets management software but it is becoming too heavy for my old Mac and I cannot justify (or afford) to replace my hardware.

2 thoughts on “February Update”

I really like the Mexican Grackle painting. The grackle is one of my favorite birds, mostly because they have so much character. Good luck on the photo archives!

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