Avoiding the pasted-on look

Some­times you look at a paint­ing in which each pas­sage is com­pe­tently exe­cuted, but the over­all look just doesn’t hold together. The parts don’t look like they exist in the same visual space. Usu­ally, the prob­lem is with incon­sis­tent key­ing, with edge con­trol, or both.

Key

Key refers, of course, the the range of col­ors in the paint­ing. The most impor­tant key is the value key. If the degree of light and dark on one object doesn’t fit that of other objects in the paint­ing, then they won’t look like they belong together. It’s easy to get so involved in one par­tic­u­lar pas­sage that its value key doesn’t fit that of other parts of the paint­ing. Another pos­si­ble look, besides that of being pasted-on, is that some pas­sages fade out inexplicably.

It is, of course, pos­si­ble to sim­i­larly mess up the chroma key or the hue key of the paint­ing. Value is a more com­mon and notice­able prob­lem, however.

The best way to avoid incon­sis­ten­cies in key is to fre­quently step way back from the paint­ing and either squint or throw your eyes slightly out of focus. Incon­sis­ten­cies tend to stand out.

Edges

Another way to inad­ver­tently achieve a pasted-on look is to make all your edges equally hard. If all of the edges are the same, then all of the objects appear to come for­ward equally and the paint­ing fails the verisimil­i­tude test. Some oth­er­wise excel­lent aca­d­e­mic real­ists make this mis­take. So do many begin­ners who have begun to develop the abil­ity to render.

Softer edges recede, harder edges advance. Con­trol edges and you con­trol the dimen­sion­al­ity of each object in the paint­ing. Do that con­sis­tently and the paint­ing looks like each pas­sage is part of a whole.