Well my interpretation. This is a sheet of watercolour paper heavily gesso'd and then a base acrylic and marker layer applied. I then worked on it with Oil sticks and used sgraffito and blended using my fingers before cutting into it with pencils and palette knives...falls into the realms of organised messing about if you delete any technical jargon.
So there is my house, the cemetery, Water of Gregg and a watery winters sun. Read into the rest of it as you may !! The image of the Water of Gregg is from Robert Moyes Adam  just follow the link to learn more

,,,that I would be dumping my long term partner and casting my gaze over a stripped down competitor that has been lifting it's skirts in my direction these past couple of months....Yes I may be on the cusp of burning my 'I love Adobe' T-Shirt and cladding myself head to toe in Capture One leisure wear. For Interweb fanboys you probably know that Adobe really can't be bothered to faffle with Lightroom to make it work with. Fuji X trans processor files, load your files , and just like I did, wonder why your eye wateringly expensive Fuji camera could produce such dross and on such a regular basis.
But, trumpet fanfare time, there is a match made in heaven and what makes it better is that it is a freebie for Fuji and Sony fanboys in the form of a stripped back RAW editing interface, okay bad news is it doesn't export DNG or RAW but you can get by with the Tiff and for most uses Jpeg....besides that once you have followed their comprehensive training videos photo faffling does become quite easy . All the Fuji profiles are there but with a lot of tools like gradients and adjustment brushes not being present, get it right in camera and you shouldn't need them anyway. Now this isn't a programme if you want to 'shake it like a polaroid picture' and blend layers or tug and pull perspective, but if you want a no nonsense Raw convertor then this is a good one to try.
​It looks like they do a freebie for Nikon Shooters as well...so give it a go, In the new year I will try the fully blown version and see if I need it.
​Right another new gallery over on Photo Art as well. Thanks for calling by.

...who knew that oil paint came in a stick and also that we had a ready supply of them already in the house!!. So another technique to have a go at and also witter away some more hours on the University of YouTube . YouTube is 15 years old btw...I need to go and see what was thought of as must have apps back then...anyway, nothing really thematic about these but I quite like how they have worked out. Gesso on Arches paper, 11 x 8 inches and then lots of layers and acrylic, pencil, graphite and oil pastel.

...is where I spend a lot of time. So many differing types of beach on this stretch of coast, I've done blogposts in the past, Ballantrae was one of them . Now we are in proper winter (allegedly it will snow tomorrow)(...it did...) the sun is always low, the sunsets on the beach have headed down south and there is a distinct nip in the air. I've posted a new set of images in Photo Art looking at shape and texture in an almost 2 dimensional photographic way by looking at the sea wall at Girvan.. I was out on Monday trying to capture some long exposure images but the wind put paid to any sharpness so straight in the bin for that lot!.
Also found a dead Bay Porpoise so contacted the marine Research unit at Strathclyde University and they wanted co-ordinates, which I provided, so a volunteer could go and pick it up for examination. Anyway some recent images.

...a poorly porpoise...

For those of you who have hung about on this 'Journey' of mine from Linocut to Gelli plates then onwards to acrylics and now...yes almost there, using Oil Sticks and next up is Oil paint and Cold Wax...the end of the learning exercise..... and thanks for sticking with me on this. 
    There has been some terrible Bin Fodder produced along the way but they do or did make excellent fire starters. So these 2 are on 60 x 40cm  canvas boards, I'm looking at panels to work on next, there is some collage work underneath and I've used Gesso to add texture to the surface. Newest problem I've found is the drying time of the Oil Sticks...anyway. I've spent hours on the University of Youtube looking and learning and would like to thanks all those folk who have used there time to put together such a huge volume of learning resources, I've hardly had anytime to watch any Cat videos. So at this point I know the style of image I want to produce, the materials I need to do that and the time to put it into being. Well there appears to be some sort of lockdown going on, here up in the hills of Scotland it's just another day... So I did promise photography next and I have put a small group of images together so ….next up...Photography !!!!. Thanks for calling by.


Sorry the image above is 'Apero'..had some great ones in France, a short burst of socialising at the end of the day...time limited, but alcohol and snacks.
Down below is 'Diner pour Un' which if I remember from my Breton days is against the Law and you were welcomed into any household for a proper meal.

...this could be Gort contemplating how to fix the gift that Klaatu was about to give to the POTUS after he  was shot at by one of those pesky nervous soldiers in the Day the Earth Stood Still Good use of a Theremin as well. But no this another acrylic on board but looking at Still Life in this 'Acrylic on board' style I'm working with at the moment. So rather than being pure abstract there is an element of looking or thinking about the subject matter. Now I'm working on 60 x 40 boards, one day when I'm a grown up painter I'll get something bigger to splash the paint onto. 

For a long time that this image was developing, it only had the figurative outline on the right and basically a shemozzle of confusion to the left, so having no fear and my inner critic in the bin I covered the whole image in black paint and looked and started again...so really I'm just dealing in destructive layers, a bit like the early days of mashing Jpegs in Photoshop 4 a few decades ago
Out with the electric sander(!!!!!), indeed yes just to cut back into the paint and start again.  Now what comes to mind, as it's film connection day is one that should be watched through your fingers is David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers with Jeremy Irons as the twin Gynaecologists..it doesn't end well...spoiler alert...and finally for this week.

So this was always going to be about a food/table based still life again the bottle shape on the right hand side was there from the beginning with the left hand side taking a while to develop...I'm thinking Soup de Poisson and baguettes and probably the café where Amelie works, definitely a go to film on those Grim wet Sundays which are lining up to distribute their meteorological  joy.  So there we go, 3 this week with an image of Turnberry Beach on the go and another set of boards to create some mayhem on. Thanks for dropping by, some Photography up next.

It's been a while since I last worked with some Acrylic, but with winter closing in and daylight at a premium for Photography it is time to restart things. This time a bit different though, not monoprinting but using larger sized wooden boards. The 3 images on here are just finished with one more to be completed tomorrow, board size is 53 x 38 cms and I'm working with multiple layers and collaging ( with my own work) and sanding , scraping , rebuilding...well all kinds of stuff. I need to put  black edges on these pieces to finish them off and am a bit unsure as to either matt finish them or whack some gloss varnish over them, probably only one way of finding out.. So that's me sorted through the next lot of Yellow warnings from the Met Office, I'll leave you with these next 3.

...or how I came to terms with Capture One.

The transition from a Bayer based chip to that of a Fuji X Trans device has been more troublesome than I thought. 10 years of having a Nikon RAW to Lightroom workflow has been knocked on it's head by Adobes imaging products  rendering Fuji files into a mushy unsharp mess that no matter how much faffology is employed, the final results just stink. I thought it was me, I thought it was the camera and so I invested yet another chunk of time investigating what could possibly be going wrong...well turns out things were more simpler than I thought.
I'd played with a demo version of Capture One but , because of my 22 years of Adobe based footling, found the interface non-intuitive and a learning exercise I could do without considering the time I had invested in Adobe products. So I downloaded Capture One for Fujifilm, a cut down freebie version for Fuji users and after a bit of online learning finally found how to unlock the quality of Image file that the little Fuji X100V produces. They are sharp, crisp and have an amazing range in them and another positive is that Capture One doesn't seem to clog up the CPU and RAM like the latest version of Lightroom does, so here are some shots from our Tier 3 trip to Largs, Viking territory on the Ayrshire coast.
Just to say, there is no sharpening or clarity applied to these either in camera or through the software. So off to try and automate the workflow from capture one to Photoshop and probably organise an ADIOS to Lightroom....probably....

​

I wrote a blog piece on my other (soon to be defunct) site about never giving in to your inner critic, power through it don't give in to it, just create images . Now this doesn't mean that you will be creating images that explode with a Tsunami of likes out there on interwebland but it does mean you will always be working towards seeing things your way and this, at the moment is how I see things my way. I'm still getting to grips with the FujiX100v as it really is so different to be hoicking a big Dslr kit around, but I'll get there.
Now on to these images which are a combination of ICM and straight images then brought together in Photoshop CC. Blending layers is a pretty straight forward thing using opacity or blend modes, knocking out pixels or just masking. The technical bits can be learnt quite easily , Youtube is a great source of learning but it takes time. The next is planning out what you want the final image to look like....yes the hard bit...and it all takes time to learn and also think about what image you want to create, it will be much harder if your driving force is a thumbs up. smiley face or a like. Now I read an article the other day which tried to define when photography becomes illustration and the use of Computer programmes in the post processing workflow. I think that if you capture any image using a digital device, any finished final image should be a product of the person who created it, and that is the important bit, well for me, not only the capture but how you want that final image to look like. So I'll leave it to Frank to serenade us out.... 

For what is a man, what has he got
If not himself then he has not
To say all the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows, I took the blows
But I did it my way