I spent the night trying to get my scanner to work with my laptop. Since upgrading past OSX Snow Leopard (quite a few years ago now), the Epson-provided scanner software stopped working for me. Epson provided drivers to work with the inbuilt Image Capture software, but I discovered that the RGB channels would be misaligned. Finding this unsatisfactory, I experimented with different drivers and software, and somehow broke the Image Capture compatibility – although the software recognised the scanner it would sit indefinitely waiting for the scanner to respond.
A few days ago I noticed Epson had released new drivers so I was hopeful that they would work. Unfortunately, that proved not to be the case. I dug through all the old driver files, manually deleted as much as I could find, reset all printer/scanner settings (that’s quite sad actually as I have a bunch of printer presets lost now), reinstalled the full 2GB bundle of drivers for all Epson products, purged VueScan from my system, turned my computer off and on again and finally, somehow, the scanner is back to mostly working in the buggy way it did three years ago.
Having to fix the channels in Photoshop is less inconvenient than having to boot up an entirely separate machine just to scan documents, so I guess I’ll live with it for now. Not being able to easily scan documents is one of the reasons why I’ve been less prolific outside of Facebook/Twitter, where I’ve been taking photos of my finished pieces with some “artfully” thrown in paintbrushes and pencils to embellish the scene. So hopefully with an easier access to scanning I can share a bit more art here.
Anyway I can’t go another blog post without posting a bit of art, so here’s a painting inspired by a photo of a friend. The original photo included a lot of fog and interesting lighting effects, in the end this painting kind of took its own path.
Shown above is a photo of the WIP, taken just before I started painting. I initially struggled to draw this as a realistic rendering, but ultimately decided to just draw a figure posed the same as the reference photo instead.
When it came time to painting it I was almost going to go for full colour but early into the painting process the pink started to emerge as a highlight colour throughout the piece so I refrained from including other colours.
