​Here are some quick outdoor photos of Silas. It's difficult to see much detail in the partial as the lighting isn't quite right. I could fiddle with my camera settings to try to get a better exposure, but my faithful model and husband has breathing difficulties, and so can only wear the mask for maybe five minutes tops. Not much time for fiddling. 

​My husband and I could theoretically switch roles, with me modelling and him taking pictures, but unfortunately photography is not my husband's strong suit. I'm modelling here while my daughter is taking pictures. She's a good photographer but has limited patience for these endeavors. Still, most importantly, you can see that the exposure is still not great and not a lot of detail is visible in the mask.

The beginnings of an indoor setup! My husband, a teacher, had just made a video with his kids at school and so was all excited about the idea of a green screen, so that's what we got for a backdrop. I learned shortly afterwards that any color solid backdrop would have worked, and a non green backdrop would have worked better, as the green threw up a lot of green reflections on the partial which had to be edited out later. But that's what GIMP is for. My floodlights from my tabletop setup worked just fine, though it was a pain to carry them up from the basement to the living room, which had taller ceilings.   

And....a downside of indoor setups like this one... cats love 'em. This older cat was relatively well behaved but our younger cat had to be locked out of the room, as she wanted to play with the backdrop REAL BAD and nearly pulled all the stands into every last item in the living room, including my beloved model horse collection.

​(Photobomb..... )

​If I were going to go through all the trouble of learning how to remove figures from their backgrounds, I wanted some cool backdrops to stick them on after! I took this picture on Pearl Street in my hometown of Barre, VT, a new pedestrian walkway featuring a granite sculpture of a castle. (Barre was given a large bequest by a wealthy resident, which was used among other things to commission a number of granite statues commemorating Barre's long history of quarrying and stoneworking.) It only seemed fitting to incorporate images of other local artists' handiwork along with my own.  

​Background photo number two, also of the granite castle sculpture on Pearl Street in Barre....

​I followed the instructions for building a simple spray booth I found in this article in Fine Woodworking magazine. (Link to the article can be found here.) The two illustrations to the left sum up the most relevant info nicely. In summary, the booth is made out of rigid foam insulation and the sides and back are fastened together with duct tape, so it is lightweight, foldable, and easy to transport. The back panel has a hole cut in the center into which a furnace filter is placed. A box fan is set behind the hole for drawing air through the filter. 








The booth is placed in a way to take the best advantage of the room's air circulation, with sources of fresh air in front of it and a means of venting painty air behind it. Since there is no actual ductwork to contain the fumes, the booth does not exhaust them completely, but I can attest that it does cut down considerably the painty mist that otherwise hangs over my work area.  

It's important to note that this booth is only for water based paints such as acrylics. It is definitely not suitable for solvent based paints, that's a whole nuther animal entirely!  

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​And now, time for my own booth. ​​Before I did anything else, I made a mockup out of scrap cardboard, to be sure that I would like the dimensions and find it comfortable to work in. I actually wound up doing a fair bit of painting in this mock-up. 

Right, my own booth in progress. ​I used one 4' x 8' sheet of 1/2" thick insulation that I purchased at the local lumberyard. I chose a white color so that as much light as possible would be reflected back onto my work. Since the fiberglass inside the panel was very irritating to my hands, I also put duct tape over all the cut edges to contain it. It's white, so it's hard to see here.  

​Left, making sure the furnace filter is installed correctly! The arrow has to match the direction of the airflow when the filter is installed.

The filter is a basic, inexpensive one. According to the Fine Woodworking article, a higher grade of filter, one that could screen out microbes, dander, and such, would get filled with paint and plug up too quickly. Here you can also see the duct tape I applied around all the cut edges to contain irritating fiberglass.

​ I also added bulb weatherstripping around the outside of the filter, under the theory it would make the booth more airtight. I'm not sure it was worth the effort. In trying to get the weatherstripping into the gaps I sometimes had to make the gaps larger, so I may have been working counter to my purpose.
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