Welcome back into my gentle rabbithole of weird niche painting projects! Come inside; the stakes are low and we’re speaking in nice soft tones. Part 1 is here, if you are interested in revisiting another tepid saga.
To recap: the paintings I do for Unnameable Colors are colors with names like “the stain of stickiness from a broken jam jar which you will never fully clean up.” They are heavy body acrylic paintings on cold press paper, done with palette knives. Truly chonky. The hardest part about scanning these paintings is capturing the texture and the high-gloss finish. The softness in the acryllic is prone to squarshing, which adds another layer of challenge. In previous years I’ve had to work around the chunkier parts of the paint smooshing against the scanner glass and creating odd reflective artifacts.
Year one was 2021, my pandemic hobby year and it wasn’t exactly sophisticated. I scanned the paintings on my partner’s old scanner, and had some copies printed using a direct-to-consumer vendor for gifts. I put the link out there for others to buy too (holy internet archives, it’s still live). It was very low-rent but I was quite touched at the reaction and the texts I received at the beginning of the month when folks would turn the page for new art.
Year two was 2024, and in the two years between I upped my scanning game considerably. I still struggled with my chunky reflections, and for each month did four little swatches of the color with subtle variations. I called this version “Analogous Palettes.” I also found a domestic printer I love, moving on from drop shipping (hooray for quality control and pricing that isn’t inflated for direct-to-consumer!).
Year two I utilized ICC profiles with great success, making as minimal changes necessary to capture white paint, which is incredibly difficult to scan with detail. This is primarily due to the high gloss finish. I wanted to let the color management do the heavy lifting. This year, I developed a technique that allows me to largely make no changes to the ICC profile settings, so I am very excited to receive the calendars and (of course) measure the difference between the originals and the prints.
This scanning technique works by raising the painting a little off the bed, while at the same time applying upwards tension to the paper so it doesn’t warp. And it was at least half intentional.
My first pass of scans I very simply raised the paintings up using a cut piece of acrylic to just under the size of the paintings, 8″ x 8″. The painting delicately rests on top. This worked great for eliminating smooshing artifacts and reflections, but I could see a little warping in the cold press paper, as paper doesn’t have the surface tension of a stretched canvas. I added a couple layers of acrylic to lift it up the paintings even more, and unfortunately at this height I could start to see the exposures change the look of the non-white colors, which was not ideal. At this point I though “Oh well, I guess I’ll use the elevated technique for white and the flat-pressed scans for darker color,” which seemed like an awfully punishing task for a fun-project. However: see the rest of my personality for proof I choose odd punishing tasks not infrequently.
At the last minute, I was packing the paintings away in archival sleeves when it hit me: the sleeves provide just enough tension on the paintings to stretch the cold press paper straight. I put the initial lower splint back down, and scanned all the paintings inside their archival sleeves.
And I got to avoid Photoshop; rejoice!
The calendars arrived last night, and I couldn’t be more pleased. If you don’t mind spoilers, here is a video of me comparing the pages to the original paintings. What a great time!
Most of the calendars are going out soon to their recipients, and then I will put the rest up on the shop if you want to pass any along to your own friends and family. Thanks again for following my side quest. I really enjoyed this distraction this year, and I’ll send you one more note about the production. In the meantime, be well, and I hope you also find a joyfully fanatic hobby to lean into hardcore during these short days and strange times. It does keep winter a little brighter to go hard for art.
Rory
