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verisimilitude. noun. The appearance of being true or real : the detail gives the novel some verisimilitude.

I’m not talking about a perfect imitation of visual experience—that’s only one possible tool for achieving verisimilitude. I’m talking about looking at a painting (or part of a painting) and knowing what it’s like to be there, looking at the the thing the artist sees or imagines. It’s a sense of recognition, of grokking. Some highly “realistic” paintings have no sense of verisimilitude; some highly stylized paintings have it in droves.

For me, most photorealism is lacking in verisimilitude and therefore doesn’t draw my interest. Making a painting that looks like a photo creates no feeling of recognition. Most paintings by Paul Cezanne, although on one level relatively stylized, have a sense of reality that is completely engrossing. Any painting that effectively creates a sense of verisimilitude is interesting to me. Any painting that doesn’t, regardless of its technical achievement, tends to bore me.

In looking at a particular painting more closely, I often get a sense that the artist has nailed the verisimilitude in some parts of the work but not others. That’s often my sense of paintings by Van Gogh, for example—I see pieces that brilliantly let me see the artist’s viewpoint, while other parts just look like a scribble in paint.

In judging my own work, I find the same thing. Parts of any painting seem to have a high level of verisimilitude, while other parts are just placeholders for what I didn’t have the skill to properly represent. I know I’m done with a painting when I don’t know how to give any part of it any more verisimilitude.

In painting with oil, it’s standard to use white to lighten mixtures. White (whether lead white, titanium white, or zinc white) is incredibly useful as there are many colors that can’t be obtained without it. Contrariwise, there are also colors that can’t be mixed if you use white. White lightens, but it also cools (in most circumstances), decreases chroma (except when applied in small amounts with some cool colors), and increases opacity. There are some circumstances in which you want to lighten (increase the color’s value) without the other effects of adding white. For example:

• In traditional oil painting technique, it is often appropriate to keep shadows transparent. That basically means mixing shadow colors without any white.
• Because white usually decreases chroma, mixtures involving white can be lower in chroma than you want. As a result, painters sometimes complain of paint mixtures that are too “chalky.” They get lights that have a pastel look with low chroma. While that is sometimes exactly the right color (in which case no one complains) we sometimes want lights that are as high in chroma as possible.

While oil painters don’t generally depend on white-freen paint mixtures to nearly the degree that watercolor painters do, it’s important to know how to paint without white when you need to. If you just need a dark color, that’s easy. If you need to paint a range of values, then you’ll need to find mixtures that achieve that value range. The ease of doing so depends on what part of the color wheel you’re working with.

There are plenty of high-value yellows, for example. If you need to lighten a yellow or brown mixture, you can usually do so by mixing in a lighter yellow (I like lead-tin yellow for this purpose, or a cadmium yellow if I’m looking for higher chroma). Reds are more difficult—it’s hard to mix a light red without dropping the chroma (i.e., making it pink). Genuine vermillion is sometimes useful because it is somewhat light and doesn’t drop chroma in mixtures the way cadmiums of similar color can do. Oranges can be lightened by adding a lighter yellow and then, if necessary, adjusting back to the right hue with a bit of red. A yellow green can similarly be lightened with yellow.

Cooler colors (blue, green, blue-green, purple) are more difficult to lighten, since the tube colors in this range are often pretty dark. Some cobalt blues can be relatively light and therefore quite valuable (although they are also opaque, so they don’t help as much if you are looking for transparency).

The other solution, of course, is to paint thinly onto a white surface, just as in traditional watercolor. The method used by Ted Seth Jacobs and his students such as Tony Ryder, for example, typically begins with a “color wash.” That means applying the first layer of paint very thinly, mixed with dilutant. While wet, the color can be lightened by wiping away paint with a dry rag or brush; or one dipped in dilutant. In this method, the initial color wash layer is later painted over with opaque paint mixed with white. A similar method can be used with traditional glazing technique or when a certainly watercolor-ish look is desired.

If you’re not used to painting without white, a good exercise is to try to complete a painting while using white only when absolutely necessary. That can generate an overall range of value and chroma that is markedly different than a painting in which white is used liberally. If you struggle with “chalky” mixtures, a minimal white approach can really help.

There are two basic positions for painting—sitting and standing. For oil painting, I generally find it best to stand. It’s in the nature of painting that you stand in one position for long periods.

How do you stand comfortably for hours at a time? Millions of people in Western countries suffer from back pain, in large part because of poor posture. It’s important to avoid standing while painting in a manner that contributes to your own back problems.

Here are some basic principles to keep in mind:

• Slouching for long periods will eventually wreck your back.
• Standing up “straight,” with your back muscles at tension, is uncomfortable and you will stop doing it as soon as you are no longer paying attention.
• Instead, you’ll need to develop a standing position that keeps your head over your spine, your spine over your hips, and your hips over your heels. That keeps your body in alignment so that standing does not place undue pressure on your spine, back, hips, neck, or other parts of your body.

How do you do that? Stand up. Feet facing forward, about shoulder width apart or a little wider.

Now feel your hips. Many people in Western countries habitually tilt their hips backward. This leads to a rounded back and hunched shoulders. Instead, tilt your hips forward. Your waistline should be at an angle downward, so that the buckle of your belt (if you’re wearing a belt) is a bit lower than the back of the belt.

Don’t overdo it to the point that you feel tension in your lower back. The idea is that you are stacking your spine so that it bends correctly and is balanced directly over the hips.

Standing with your hips tilted forward tends to pull your shoulders back, but if you’re used to rolling them forward, make sure they are aligned backward. If you’re a woman, that means boobs up, ladies. This makes breathing easier by expanding your lung space. You should feel your spine align itself over your forward-tilted hips. This is a position in which your spine can be at rest while you are erect.

Your head should also be aligned straight, with your neck over your hips. Moving downward, your weight should be balanced over your heels, not your toes.

This is a comfortable standing position that can be maintained for long periods. If it’s not your habitual way of standing, then you’ll need to train your body to do it. The hard part is that painting takes so much focus that it’s very difficult to also concentrate on posture. One way to do that is to start painting in this position, and make sure that every few minutes you take a few steps back from the painting and look at your progress. That’s very good practice when painting anyway so that you don’t get tied up in fussy details. While you do that, attend to your  position and when you go back to painting, make sure that you’re standing correctly. Over time, you’ll catch yourself in the correct position without having assumed it consciously. Your back will thank you for it.

For more information, read Esther Gokhale’s excellent book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. Even if you don’t usually have a sore back, do yourself a favor and get a copy of this book. It’s that good.

Later on, we’ll talk about how to paint in a seated position without hurting yourself.

Caveat: I have no credentials that support giving health advice. Please don’t assume that I know what I am talking about. If you have any relevant health problems, consult a professional before doing anything I suggest.

It’s crap. Your heart will never have any idea how to paint.

Of course, there are a few artists out there who could benefit from some loosening up. For every one of them, there are a hundred others who need to learn how to actually paint. This entails the acquisition of difficult skills and the mindset to use those skills to achieve specific goals. Some of those skills are:

• How to draw
• How to draw exactly what you see
• How to draw the figure
• How to draw the portrait
• Proportion
• Perspective
• Foreshortening
• Color theory
• Color mixing
• Composition
• Brush handling
• Rendering
• Art history
• And lots more

That is the case even if you want to paint loosely. Read Richard Schmid’s book on painting (he paints in a loose alla prima style that is wondrous to behold) and you’ll see how hard it is to learn how to paint that way, too.

Heck, it’s a lot of work learning to paint abstractly, if you want to do it well.

Painting from the heart is for lazy people who just want to schmear paint around, feel artistic, and find people to tell them how wonderful it must be to paint.

Instead, learn to paint with your mind and your soul. That’s a lot harder, but will take you much further toward making paintings that belong on a stranger’s wall.

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.

Because the structure of an oil painting is inherently complex, it’s always best to attempt keep both it and its various components as simple as possible. However, this element of simplicity should not necessarily extend to purchasing ready-made materials if the hope or expectation is to create higher quality work: generic materials have a strong tendency to produce generic work. While boutique materials are usually higher quality, this is not necessarily the case with the oil. And they still don’t impart the vital information about the nuts and bolts of the craft: at the end of the day, there is no real process, just a set of purchases, a pseudo-craft.

Go read the whole thing.

Recommendations include:

• Drawing a line along the weave of the canvas in pencil along the boundary beforehand, so that you can check to see that the edge of the stretcher is even with the canvas weave as you apply it to the stretcher chassis.
• Stapling or tacking from the edges of the canvas inward. This is exactly opposite from the way every other source I’ve seen says to do it.
• Using pushpins for the initial attachment of the canvas to the stretcher, for ease of adjustment, before final tacking or stapling.
• Letting the canvas settle onto the frame for a day or two, with adjustment as needed, prior to final tacking or stapling.

These methods differ from standard practice, but the author makes a good case.

(Note that I found this article via a related post by Randall Stoltzfus.

Brunelleschi was the first Renaissance artist to use the vanishing point and depth perception during this time period. Brunelleschi additionally noticed that when drawing Florentine buildings, all lines converged at the horizon line, therefore leading to the realization of the vanishing point. Other artists such as Donatello and Perugino helped to further cement the importance of depth during this time, culminating in Da Vinci’s Last Supper; never before had there been a painting with such mathematical accuracy in relation to depth perception and linear formation. The realization of linear perspective and the vanishing point was kept within Italy for years before flourishing throughout the rest of Europe.

The checkerboard floor pattern is one of the most obvious examples of original perspective. Alberti was one of the first artists to recognize this phenomenon, and named it as the “pavement” construction, as it typically led to the addition of a pavement scene. He later wrote a treatise entitle “De Pictura/Della Pittura” explaining the proper methods of perspective painting. His theories were based more on planar projections and calculations using the height of triangles in the distance, and also using previous mathematical concepts from Euclid.

The vanishing point and depth perception are concepts which we take for granted today because we have never known an art world without them; however, if you traverse through the ages, you will see pieces from the Middle Ages where the baby Jesus appears to be the same size as Mary because the artists had no way in which to signify perspective. It is amazing to view in art museums this subtle change in technique; many museums have paintings set up in chronological order, or at least by major movements. The Renaissance was truly its own movement within the art world, and symbolized a shift away from the chaotic, extremely fanatical world of the Middle Ages.

Without this kind of revolution within the art world, we would still be looking at one-dimensional art works, lacking a proper depth perception. This would prove to be a completely different world from the one we know now, perhaps even lacking the fundamentals of television and movies. Without depth in art, that could not have translated over into any other medium. Therefore, we owe a great deal to these post-Medieval artists who truly paved the way for modern art and art movements. Picasso would not have been able to exist without his acute understanding of the many layers of depth and perspective, and we therefore would have missed out on abstract art entirely as well as every subsequent modern art movement.

This post was contributed by Heidi Taylor, who writes about the online schools. She welcomes your feedback at HeidiLTaylor006 at gmail.com.

The portrait from the first week was pretty awful. Last night’s was not exactly good, but not nearly as bad. Maybe I’ll post them when I have something a little better to compare them to.

This is the first work I’ve done with portraits or figures in about three years, so I am not surprised that some of my skills have gotten rusty. One skill that has improved, however, is mixing flesh tones. I remember, when I was taking figure painting classes, having a heck of a time getting flesh tones that looked even approximately convincing, even when I could take my time over a multi-session pose of 9 or 12 hours. The poses I’ve been working from lately are only 2.5 hours, but I now find paint mixing to be relatively straightforward.

Because these are pretty short poses, I have not worried too much about getting exactly the right hue, instead choosing to concentrate of value, chroma, and shape. I’m working with a very limited palette in which flesh tones are mixed from lead white, raw sienna, burnt sienna, and raw umber. (I’ve also used some black and some ultramarine for dark hair and background.) The flesh tones are basically convincing, however: others at the session have remarked on it and my wife, who remembers my previous struggles, has mentioned that these flesh tones seem better. I should note that, thus far, the subjects have been Caucasian, although I don’t think I would have any greater trouble painting folks of less pallor.

I’m not sure why this aspect of painting has become easier, except for all the practice I’ve put in mixing still life colors over the last couple of years. The very simple palette seems to help as well.

Now if I can just get the shape of the head down correctly in paint, I’ll be just fine.

Update

7 May 2009: On further reflection, I think that one of the things I’ve learned over the last couple of years, even with a very limited palette, is much better control over chroma. Many artists mix overly intense skin tones. Most people’s skin is very low in chroma. Even when using relatively dull earth colors, you often need to cut the chroma of your mixes to get accurate color. For these portrait studies, I’ve been using raw umber for that purpose, as it’s chroma is very, very low.