Light for the Artist 3

More from “Light for the Artist” by Ted Seth Jacobs.

Poster Studies. As I mentioned before, this is a book about the actions of light, not how to paint. Nevertheless, I would like to advise painters to get into the habit of doing frequent key exercises. Treat them strictly as studies. Don’t be concerned with making a pretty picture. Key exercises are designed to deal with one problem of painting only. They have nothing to do with drawing. Do not use key exercises for any of these other problems. The only purpose of key exercises is to train yourself to register and suggest the major tonalities of a subject in very broad, general, highly simplified terms. I stress this point because students inevitably try to make “little pictures,” rather than key exercises. Don’t try to show off, to yourself or others, how well and deftly you can do a small, quick study of a model. If you start getting occupied with other problems, such as drawing, you will not be looking at the key, and mistakes will occur. In practice, we often don’t have a great deal of time in which to do a key exercise. Light conditions outdoors change rapidly, for example, and in art schools we may only have a few hours. Even at home, where we may be able to take as much time as we wish, it is in fact better for training our decision-making faculties to get the key study down quickly. With these time limitations, there is simply not enough time to take on other problems. But the real purpose of eliminating all these other aspects of painting is to concentrate all our attention on getting the key right. In key exercises, we want to find the flat poster-like averages for each major element in the picture. For this reason the exercise is also called a â��poster.â�� It takes mre time to cover a large canvas, so poster studies are usually kept small. They are highly simplified and in that sense abstract. We eliminate all the small shapes and variations. Wherever there is a major area of a single tonality, we find one flat color equivalent for it. It is as if we have to pick a piece of colored construction paper to suggest each major tonality. Poster studies can occupy a large chapter on their own, and this book is not the place for it. An accomplished painter should be able to do them very quickly and fairly accurately. What is important is to be able to see the subject in poster terms. A good poster study accurately suggests the key.

You can see an example of a poster study in this demo at Tony Ryder�s web site. Tony is a student of Seth�s.

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