IF: Twist; EDM #124: Something Yellow

Watercolor in Moleskine large watercolor sketchbook

This week’s Illustration Friday challenge is “Twist” — there’s nothing like a nice twist of lemon in a glass of ice water (or in something more exciting, like a lemon drop martini, which I’m sure sounds better than it tastes, since I’m not a fan of martinis). And last week’s Everyday Matters challenge was to draw something yellow…so there you go.

I did this watercolor sketch yesterday but when I scanned it, my monitor display was driving me crazy. No matter what I did in Photoshop I couldn’t get an image that looked anything like the original. I tried again and again to calibrate my monitor using Adobe Gamma but just couldn’t get it right. I finally gave up around midnight, vowing to resolve the problem today one way or another.

Today I went to a great photography store in Berkeley, Looking Glass Photo. They rent and sell everything you need for digital or film photography and they’re staffed by experts who are generous with their knowledge. Initially I was going to rent a fancy set of calibration tools but a handsome, Buddha-like man named Paul (a customer who used to work there) steered me towards buying a simpler unit for not much more money than it would have cost to rent the unnecessarily fancy tools for just one day. I bought the Gretagmacbeth Eye-One Display 2 which looks like a small regular computer mouse.

I waited until it got dark out, turned on my full spectrum overhead lights only and then hung the little device over my monitor. I tried the automatic calibration which was OK, and then I tried the more detailed program, which I think did a better job. When it finished, I scanned my little lemon twist and amazingly it appeared on my screen just like the original. I have no idea how it will look on your screen, but at last, after all the changes in my studio, my monitor, scanner and printer are all working together again. Whoopee! Now I can get back to painting instead of messing with computer stuff!

P.S. If this looks washed out or too bright on your monitor, please let me know.