Russ Croop
Infinite Zoom, Then Paint the Details
Infinite Zoom, Then Paint the Details
BY RUSS CROOP
Artist, Photographer
Colorado, USA
Versatile artist Russ Croop reveals his method of painting the finest elements in this early iPhone art masterpiece and the meaning of the words “perseverance” and “attention to detail”.
I spent seven evenings, as I sat watching TV, sketching my living room to complete this piece. When I started labeling the books on the bookcase, I knew it was going to be very detailed. As you can see from the finished piece at left, there was only one way to approach this image and that was a small chunk at a time. Below you can see sections of the piece, just so you get a sense of scale and the level of detail in things like book titles and guitar strings.
Drawing is achieved by using a finger or thumb as your brush. To create shading, you must go to the color picker and find a similar but darker or lighter shade of the same color.
The zoom feature is the key to this piece. Use your thumb and finger in the pinch motion to zoom in or out infinitely. Here we see the zoomed-in view of the lamp to the left of the TV. Without this extreme range of zooming you could never add the tiny details like the texture in the glass or the elephants.
Notice the circles on the speaker below the digital clock, and the yellow bulbs on the string of lights. By tapping once on the screen, you can create a perfect circle. The size of the circle can be changed by using the brush size slider and/or by zooming the sketch in or out. By zooming out, the relative size of the circle gets larger and, conversely, by zooming in, the relative size of the circle gets smaller.
This piece is composed with many straight and parallel objects like the books and shelves. You can make a perfectly straight line by placing your thumb on the screen
where you want the line to begin and then tapping twice with your finger on where you want it to end. It takes some practice but it’s easy to hit the undo arrow (fourth icon from left) and try again until you get the hang of it.
When I went to export the drawing it wouldn’t complete the export and repeatedly crashed my iPhone. I finally emailed “NetSketch” app developer Ben Gotow and asked him if he had heard about the guy who built a boat in his basement and then couldn’t get it out. I’d done the same thing with this image. Ben had me send him the entire iPhone back-up folder so that he could extract the file and send me the full-sized eps file. The final eps file weighs in at 85.597 x 70.931 inches at 72 ppi, and was printed as an 60 x 50 inch archival Giclee on canvas.
BY RUSS CROOP
Artist, Photographer
Colorado, USA
Photographer Russ Croop illust rates his iPhone photography through his words and images, finding that some very basic photo graphic principles apply perfectly to this new medium.
Wonder started out with a simple iPhone photograph imported into “Photo Canvas”, where the stars, bubbles. swirls of light, and the YES stamp were added to create this simple collage.
Fragile is a compilation of three photographs combined in the app “Juxtaposer”. The rose photo was used as the background, and the two mannequin images were cut from their original photos using the eraser tool and positioned over the rose. The FRAGILE stamp was added using the app “Photo Canvas”.
I photographed these shiny, nested bowls to create this self-portrait. I corrected the exposure and increased the saturation in the app “Photogene”.