the bather by Gay Nickle Lauritzen

This was the piece the gallery put on the postcard notice for the show. There were numerous requests for extra postcards. More than one of Gay’s friends claimed it as their portrait.

The drafts below show stages from August 1999 to just before the files were sent to the printer in mid-February. Some of those steps overlapped, she was working on the middle stages all at the same time, going back and forth.

There are sometimes several layers for an image. Below are two: the outline and some colors. The blue wasn't an idea for the whole bathing suit color but a background color that's still there in the final version, showing in the spaces between the other colors.

This is the what it looked like before it was sent to the printer. She was particularly happy about the red fingernail.

There were color issues. On Gay's equipment the background looked sky blue, but it was more aqua on other equipment and in a print test. And the archival inks used produced darker colors overall. So Gay made the final version for the printer with a slightly bluer background and lighter reds and oranges:

She had to consider this kind of thing for every piece with color. For printing she often lightened colors in ways she wouldn't have for viewing on a screen. Since this website is viewed on screen, the main versions shown at the top of each page usually use the prelightened colors. The versions lightened for printing sometimes had other corrections or changes that make sense for the screen too, so sometimes the main versions shown here combine elements of the printer version and an earlier version.

The version at the top of this page combines the earlier bolder reds and oranges with the final slightly bluer background.

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