----
2-8-2026 - Art series: My watercolor analog-digital workflow
----

I took the time to scan and post a few more of my 4" watercolor image
to the 'art' section of the gopher hole, under 'book 3' -- a book
upon whose cover I painted "Art (maybe)."  There are exactly two
paintings I actually like in this collection (so far), but I wanted
to take this opportunity to document (brag about) the complicated
process for scanning my watercolor sketches.  I'm proud that I'm able
to employ many different retro hardware and software components in
this process.  Here it is:

 - A Microtek 24-bit color flatbed SCSI scanner, attached to my ->
 - Performa 640CD (DOS) computer, using ->
 - Microscan 1.0.6 on the System 7.6 side, passing off to my ->
        (because my TCP stack got hosed on Mac side)
 - Windows for Workgroups 3.11 PC side, for transferring the ->
 - TIFF files, using a ->
 - 3Com 10baseT Ethernet hub, to my ->
 - Beige G4 Mac, where I use ->
 - Photoshop 7.0 to crop and resize my scans to a
        retrocomputing-friendly 640x480-or-less resolution
 - (and then I scp these JPGs to my gopher host)

I mean, it's a little tedious, but it's also cool, right?  Of course,
this process is also a little fragile -- this hardware is all on
borrowed time.

Oh, and when I fill all of the pages of a watercolor book, I take all
of the scans, in full-res, and copy them to a microSD card which I
then embed physically in the book itself -- a kind of reversal of the
process -- from digital to analog?

postscript:  If I painted a painting using UV-reactive paints, I also
             light up the scanner with a blacklight bulb. (in addition
             to the standard white light)  Maybe you can spot these?
             
.