art technique

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Wipe

13 November 2008 in art technique, oil painting by David | No comments

So tonight I’m work­ing on my “White Shirt” paint­ing. I spend a good hour on the most detailed part of the piece—the hangar hook and its shadow. I do a really nice job, with small brushes, get­ting each curve and the flash of metal just right. Detailed, but not too fussy. Then I step back.

I’ve made an error. The hook is too small. It looks almost right, but not quite.

I sit for a minute, then take a rag dipped in turps and wipe it off the paint­ing. You need to be will­ing to do that some­times, just as an author needs to be able to delete a won­drous chap­ter that just doesn’t work with the rest of the novel. If it’s not right, it has to go, no mat­ter how much you like it.

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More on chroma

21 February 2008 in color, painting by David | No comments

Decker Walker posted a thought­ful com­ment on my recent tongue in cheek post on Chroma Clue­less­ness Syndrome.

I agree that indis­crim­i­nate reliance on high chroma leads to dis­cor­dant, brassy, loud paint­ings. But the alter­na­tive of match­ing the chroma of nature is not, in my opin­ion, the best solu­tion. Since paints have such a lim­ited range of value and chroma com­pared to nature, painters who try to match nature’s col­ors exactly wind up with a dull, dim pic­ture. This is most evi­dent in a clear blue sky. No paints can mix a blue that is as intense and yet as light in value as that sky. Only by selec­tively and art­fully exag­ger­at­ing the chroma rela­tion­ships and value dif­fer­ences observed in nature can a painter approach the color rela­tion­ships we see in nature. I’m not speak­ing here of the expres­sive exag­ger­a­tion of color for emo­tional effect, but sim­ply of paint­ing a real­is­tic pic­ture of the scene before you.

I don’t think there’s much dis­agree­ment between us. My objec­tion is to artists who use high chroma thought­lessly, because they think that a paint­ing that con­sists entirely of intense col­ors is “pret­tier” or more “excit­ing” than one that is more mod­u­lated, or because all of the paints they own are high in chroma and they never learned how to mix them to get a desired chroma.

If I might be indulged in quot­ing myself, here’s what I wrote in an arti­cle on color mixing:

Let me give you an exam­ple. I was brows­ing through art books in a book­store the other day and found one about the paint­ing tech­niques of the impres­sion­ists. It’s a very well writ­ten book, based on lots of research on the indi­vid­ual meth­ods of many 19th cen­tury artists. There are a num­ber of demon­stra­tions in which the author copies a sec­tion of an impres­sion­ist paint­ing, using the meth­ods of the orig­i­nal artist. In every sin­gle case, through­out the entire book, the author gets the chroma badly wrong and pretty much every­thing else right. In par­tic­u­lar, almost every color is one or two chroma steps higher than the cor­re­spond­ing color in the orig­i­nal. Impres­sion­ists were not known for mak­ing dull pic­tures, but the author felt the need to “improve” the orig­i­nals by bump­ing the chroma, even though she was clearly mak­ing a seri­ous attempt to use the same or sim­i­lar pig­ments and tech­niques. What’s more, I don’t think she knew she was doing it. I think she believed she was doing pre­cise copies, but failed to see chroma dif­fer­ences right in front of her face. That’s just a guess on my part; some of the pig­ments used in the typ­i­cal impres­sion­ist palette were fugi­tive, so she might have been delib­er­ately com­pen­sat­ing for their ten­dency to fade. But if that’s the case, I couldn’t find where she told us that, and she was cer­tainly increas­ing the chroma even in areas cor­re­spond­ing to those painted with light­fast pig­ments. So either the repro­duc­tions in the book are badly messed up (and no one caught it) or this artist has a remark­able insen­si­tiv­ity to chroma.

I see sim­i­lar errors on inter­net forums in which ama­teur artists post copies of old mas­ter works. The chroma is usu­ally too high—often much, much too high. That might have some­thing to do with how the work has been pho­tographed, dig­i­tized, and pre­sented on com­puter mon­i­tors, but in case after case, the posted copy appears con­sis­tently more chro­matic than the orig­i­nal, even when the artist has shown them side by side. The artists usu­ally seem unaware of this dif­fer­ence, and some­times have trou­ble see­ing it even when it is pointed out to them.

Decker’s exam­ple of push­ing the chroma in the sky because you just can’t cap­ture the chroma and value in paint at the same time is an excel­lent one. It makes me think of Max­field Par­rish, who painted skies with high chroma, but never cluelessly.

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Chroma Cluelessness Syndrome

14 February 2008 in art technique, color by David | 9 comments

Severe Chroma Clue­less­ness Syn­drome affects about 32% of artists. It is char­ac­ter­ized by mak­ing paint­ings with uncon­trolled high chroma (inten­sity). Symp­toms include:

  • High chroma col­ors make up most of the patient’s paintings.
  • The patient might agree that a sym­phony that con­sists only of high notes would be excru­ci­at­ing to lis­ten to, but thinks that a paint­ing that con­sists only of high chroma col­ors is “col­or­ful” and “exciting.”
  • The patient doesn’t actu­ally know how to adjust the chroma of mixes. In severe cases, the patient may apply only straight tube col­ors to your paint­ings, with­out ever mixing.
  • The patient never uses earth colors.

Please give gen­er­ously to the Inter­na­tional CCS Insti­tute. CCSI doc­tors are work­ing tire­lessly, day and night, to develop new and inno­v­a­tive treat­ments for this debil­i­tat­ing disorder.

Related arti­cle

Color and Color Mixing

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The schmear

21 July 2007 in art technique by David | 8 comments

It didn’t start with the impres­sion­ists. Paint­ing with expres­sive strokes in which the artist cre­ates the impres­sion of a lot more than what’s directly pre­sented goes back to at least the 16th cen­tury. Velazquez, for exam­ple, did it bril­liantly. It has been one of the core skills of most of the great visual artists, in all cul­tures, since the time that the first cave paint­ings were made. We all rec­og­nize, and admire, the bravura stroke that some­how makes us see what the artist is not really show­ing us.

But the real­ity of those per­fect strokes cre­ates a hor­ri­ble temp­ta­tion for those who can’t reli­ably cre­ate them. I call it “the shmear.” When we don’t know how to paint some­thing right, we smear some paint around and call it a day. While the viewer may be able to tell what this schmear or that schmear is intended to rep­re­sent, it cre­ates no res­o­nance in the eye or the heart. It’s just a messy blob that tells you that the artist wasn’t really try­ing, at least not right there.

You can see it even in good paint­ings some­times. Monet, in my hum­ble opin­ion, relied on the schmear often when he tried to paint peo­ple. I remem­ber sit­ting in a wait­ing room one time, look­ing at a van Gogh repro­duc­tion, think­ing about which parts cre­ated a dead on sense of altered real­ity with­out any need to actu­ally ren­der what that part actu­ally looked like. A few other parts, not so much. They were just schmears, places where Vin­cent had not the skill, the time, or the san­ity to look, see, and do his magic.

I’m not talk­ing about messy pant­ing. There are artists who paint in noth­ing but loose smears that some­how pull together into a whole that just works bril­liantly. I’m tak­ing about the paint­ings, or parts of paint­ings, where the artist, so far as I can tell, got sloppy and just made a vague mess. Some artists, alas, seem to do noth­ing but schmear paint­ing. Some of them get hung on gallery walls and appear to sell for a lot of money. Per­haps it’s my own fail­ure to see the qual­ity of their work, but to me they are doing noth­ing but mess­ing around with paint. There work doesn’t con­vey any­thing. They seem to sell because peo­ple have become used to think­ing of impres­sion­is­tic paint­ing as a good thing, and they can’t really tell the dif­fer­ence. Or they can, but think that oth­ers can see what they can’t. Plenty of ama­teur artists have learned that they can play around with paint all day, mak­ing one awful schmear after another, and some­one will tell them it’s good, or at least OK.

I can’t define the dif­fer­ence between a loose, bravura pas­sage and a schmear. But it usu­ally seems fairly obvi­ous to me. I’m not try­ing to be supe­rior here or claim that I have some kind of extra­or­di­nary per­cep­tion. This is just what I see when I look at paint­ings and try to fig­ure out whether there is a res­o­nance or not.

_Update 22 July 2007:_I don’t want to give the impres­sion that I myself am immune from the schmear effect. I’ve done lots of paint­ings in which I real­ize mid­way through that I didn’t know what I was doing and had resorted to schmear paint­ing. I don’t show those here because they suck. Also, usu­ally I tend toward more detailed ren­der­ing than schmear paint­ing allows. That has its own pit­falls, of course, but in that style of paint­ing it’s harder to cover up when you don’t know what the heck you are doing.

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Composition and hierarchy

4 July 2007 in art technique by David | No comments

Most good real­ist paint­ings are about some­thing. They have a clearly read­able hier­ar­chy. There is one thing that is most impor­tant. There are other impor­tant things, while every­thing else is subordinated.

The fail­ure to orga­nize is a a com­mon beginner’s error, and one that more expe­ri­enced artists make as well some­times. It’s easy to get caught up in “just paint­ing what you see” with­out real­iz­ing that a paint­ing is a state­ment about what you think is impor­tant. If you don’t cre­ate a hier­ar­chy, you make the state­ment that noth­ing in your pic­ture is impor­tant. Paint­ings with­out hier­ar­chy don’t attract the eye and don’t have wall pres­ence. Even big com­plex paint­ings, with many fig­ure groups doing var­i­ous things, have a clear sense of hierarchy—the more com­plex the com­po­si­tion, the more impor­tant the need for mak­ing some things more impor­tant than others.

There are a vari­ety of meth­ods for estab­lish­ing hier­ar­chy, includ­ing light/dark con­trast, selec­tive focus, selec­tive detail, lines and blocks for lead­ing the eye, and many others.

David Apatoff also dis­cusses the issue of com­po­si­tional pri­or­i­ties in this post on his excel­lent Illus­tra­tion Art weblog.

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Still life

3 July 2007 in art technique by David | 3 comments

I never really though of myself as a still life painter, but that’s what I’ve been doing lately. That’s largely because I real­ized that I’m not very good at work­ing from pho­tographs. I don’t have the equip­ment for paint­ing out­doors, and besides I tend to like to work in more detail than out­door paint­ing eas­ily allows for. And I’m not cur­rently attend­ing life paint­ing classes. I do hope to start hir­ing mod­els at some point, because paint­ing live peo­ple is a won­der­ful chal­lenge. But for now, I’m paint­ing still lifes because they fit into my cur­rent work­ing approach, and because I’ve found that I like them.

I have now painted enough still lifes that I’m start­ing to think about what kind of still life painter I am (and want to be). The big advan­tage to this kind of paint­ings is that you have excel­lent con­trol over com­po­si­tion, light­ing, and so on. When some objects, like plants, change over time, in gen­eral you can work at what­ever pace you like.

  • I like sim­plic­ity. I have always dis­liked “kitchen sink” still lifes in which the artist appears to be show­ing off by paint­ing a big pile of stuff.
  • I like cast shad­ows. I love to use cast shad­ows as com­po­si­tional devices and to define the dimen­sional struc­ture of the pic­ture space.
  • I hate kitsch. I dis­like still lifes full of ugly plas­tic toys or pre­ten­tious ref­er­ences. It just doesn’t work for me. Like­wise, I dis­like folksy objects that are in the pic­ture only to bring forth a sense of sen­ti­men­tal­ity for a per­fect past that never really existed (can you tell that I’m not a Thomas Kin­caid fan?).
  • So far, I’ve avoided sur­real still lifes and scenes that are impos­si­ble or improb­a­ble, such as a ship bat­tling a storm in a teacup. I don’t hate that kind of work, but so far it doesn’t seem to fit the aes­thetic that works for me.
  • I don’t like still lifes that are about pros­per­ity or plen­ti­ful­ness, such as pic­tures of expen­sive wine bot­tles, sophis­ti­cated foods, and other objects that are there because they sym­bol­ize old money. I have no prob­lem with money (old or oth­er­wise) but paint­ing tokens of it is unin­ter­est­ing to me.
    *I like sim­ple objects that are chal­leng­ing to ren­der, such as rum­pled cloth and crum­pled paper.
  • I don’t feel the need to delin­eate a com­plex three-dimensional space. Most of the time, I paint objects on a wall or objects that I’m look­ing down on.
    So far, I’m not inter­ested in trompe l’oel.

For me, set­ting up a still life is an intu­itive process in which I try to make it inter­est­ing with­out going over line into folksy, kitschy, or just plain dumb. So far, I like the pieces I’ve done, although I’ve rejected a num­ber of planned ideas that, upon reflec­tion, didn’t work.

I’d love to get com­ments on how you think about the topic of still life.

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Critique of “When Work is Done,” by Dorothea von Eckhardt

23 June 2007 in art technique by David | 8 comments

When Work is DoneHere’s another paint­ing sent to me for cri­tique. I apol­o­gize that it’s taken me so long to get to it. It’s “When Work is Done,” oil on linen, 36 × 40”. Once again, I’d like to empha­size the prob­lems of judg­ing a paint­ing on the basis of a dig­i­tal image. col­ors, edges, and other impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tics are often dis­torted. Please keep in mind when look­ing at this image that it’s an imper­fect rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the original.

I’ll spend most of this cri­tique talk­ing about areas of poten­tial improve­ment. That’s not because the paint­ing is bad or because I don’t like it (I don’t cri­tique paint­ings I don’t like) but because that’s the pur­pose here: to come up with issues worth think­ing about so that Dorothea can take them into account when plan­ning other work.

Over­all, the paint­ing is done with skill. Objects are ren­dered real­is­ti­cally and I can’t find any obvi­ous errors in pro­por­tion, except that sev­eral of the pots seem to lean slightly to the viewer’s left. The blue/orange com­pli­men­tary color scheme is effec­tive. I’m not sure if I entirely under­stand the three-dimensional space of the paint­ing. The wall doesn’t seem entirely con­sis­tent with the steps, the floor, and the walk­ing stick. I’d find it hard to draw out an over­head floor plan of this place. Read the rest of this entry »

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If you are interested in silverpoint

27 May 2007 in art suppliers, art technique by David | 2 comments

This web site seems like a great resource for those who would like to learn to draw with sil­ver­point (or any other sort of metal-point).

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Critique of “Discovery” by Phil Holt

7 May 2007 in art technique, painting by David | 3 comments

DiscoveryI recently offered to pro­vide a pub­lic cri­tique of paint­ings and draw­ings that any­one might want to send to me. In response, Phil Holt has sent this one. It is “Dis­cov­ery,” 12 × 16”. I assume it’s in oil as he describes him­self as hav­ing painted in oil for sev­eral years. He notes, “Obvi­ously painted from a photo. I morally pre­fer to paint from life but was intrigued with the facial expres­sion on my grand­daugh­ters face.”

It takes some courage to send an image that you’ve spent many hours on and send it off to a stranger to look at and cri­tique pub­li­cally. That’s espe­cially the case since a com­puter image of a paint­ing is never per­fect, par­tic­u­larly when it is not pro­fes­sion­ally shot. There are, for exam­ple, a few strange color/value tran­si­tions that I think are almost cer­tainly pho­to­graphic arti­facts. One exam­ple is the lack of gra­da­tion in the paint around the girl’s right hand. My guess is that it isn’t there in the paint­ing itself (I’m sure Phil will cor­rect me if I’m wrong about that) or that the photo exag­ger­ates what’s there. So what I’m doing here is look­ing at a photo of a paint­ing and doing my best to imag­ine what it looks like with­out dis­tor­tions intro­duced by mak­ing a photo of a paint­ing and send­ing it as a JPEG file to be viewed on some one else’s com­puter screen. Read the rest of this entry »

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Art “experts” on the internet

16 April 2007 in art technique, personal by David | 16 comments

There are many art fora, resource sites, blogs, and other places on the inter­net where infor­ma­tion for artists is posted. This is one of them. Often, they (we?) pro­vide con­tra­dic­tory infor­ma­tion, advice, and opin­ions. If you are look­ing for reli­able advice for artists, whom do you believe?

First, with regard to safety infor­ma­tion, don’t ever just take anyone’s word for it. I have sev­eral posts here that relate to safety. But I’m just some guy. Why would you do what I say, no mat­ter how much author­ity I seem to pre­tend to have? This is your health and the health of every­one who comes in con­tact with your art stuff we’re talk­ing about here. Just because I say that lead paint, used with rea­son­able cau­tion, is per­fectly safe, is no rea­son to think it’s true. It is true, but you shouldn’t believe me just because I say so. Only believe it after you’ve checked out the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion, sep­a­rated out the truth from the fear-mongering, and decided for your­self what makes sense for you.

I’m not an expert. I don’t have a degree in art. I’m not a pro­fes­sional artist. I’ve done a lot of study­ing about art and I think I mostly know what I’m talk­ing about. But you haven’t read my sources. You haven’t tried the things I have. You haven’t made the mis­takes, or had the suc­cesses, that I have. All you have when you come to this web­site is the words and images here. You don’t know for sure whether I know what I’m talk­ing about, or I’m a clue­less blowhard.

The same goes for just about every­one else. Even peo­ple who have nice web­sites and appear to have some sort of cre­den­tials may be pro­vid­ing use­ful infor­ma­tion, or garbage. Like­wise, peo­ple who post on inter­net fora may or may not know what they’re talk­ing about. I’ve found some pretty silly stuff in books as well.

So please read with intel­li­gence and skep­ti­cism. Do that with every­thing here, and every­thing else you see on the inter­net. Try people’s advice and see if it works for you. Read other sources and com­pare. It’s more work that way, but a lot bet­ter than decid­ing that I (or any­one else) can be taken at face value. I know I have a clue, but you have no rea­son to believe me. Not until you try what I sug­gest and find out.

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Size perspective

16 March 2007 in art technique by David | No comments

Size perspective

The moun­tain is big­ger than the house; the house is big­ger than the man. When objects are sized accord­ing to how large they really are (or are expected to be) then the eye inter­prets them as exist­ing in orderly three-dimensional space. This works even when a more geo­met­ric approach would make a small object that is close to the viewer take up a larger area of the pic­ture than a large object that is far away.

Size per­spec­tive is a con­ven­tion in some pre-Renaissance West­ern art, as well as many tra­di­tional non-Western art styles, such as Per­sian or Chi­nese. It is inter­est­ing to look at works from cer­tain East­ern art tra­di­tions (such as Japan­ese wood­block prints), com­par­ing art from before and after the adop­tion of “mod­ern” geo­met­ric per­spec­tive conventions.

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Blacks

15 March 2007 in art materials, art technique, oil painting by David | 4 comments

I’ve said pre­vi­ously that the belief by some artists that the color black is some­how harm­ful to pic­tures is silly. There are many pig­ments that I don’t hap­pen to use, but I don’t think that you’ll harm your paint­ings if you use them.

The anti-black bias seems par­tic­u­larly odd when you con­sider artists like Leonardo, Velázquez, Rem­brandt, or Car­avag­gio. All of them used lots and lots of black. Although they had more lim­ited palettes than we do, they cer­tainly could have mixed darks with­out black. In other words, their exten­sive use of black was their choice. I don’t see any­one paint­ing today who could rea­son­ably say to Rem­brandt, “if you would only skip the black, your paint­ings could be as good as mine.” But there are plenty of art teach­ers today who tell their stu­dents that they should never, ever, use black. If you have a teacher who tells you that, you should con­sider whether their other advice is equally non­sen­si­cal. Read the rest of this entry »

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Edge perspective

5 March 2007 in art technique by David | No comments

Edge perspective

A hard rough edge comes for­ward. A hard smooth edge also advances, but not so much. A blended edge tends to recede.

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Shadow perspective

4 March 2007 in art technique by David | No comments

Shadow perspective Accu­rate appli­ca­tion of shadow, espe­cially cast shadow, defines three-dimensional space. This is one of the most pow­er­ful uses of chiaroscuro.

In the top exam­ple, even with fore­short­en­ing and over­lap visual cues, the space is fairly flat. In the lower exam­ple, the addi­tion of form shadow on the front­most object, and cast shadow from it, space is much more clearly defined and the illu­sion of dimen­sion­al­ity is greatly strength­ened. This is just a beginning—adding form shadow to the rear­most object, and a cast shadow from it, would enhance the effect.

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Contrast perspective

3 March 2007 in art technique by David | No comments

Contrast perspective

Objects with less con­trast against their back­ground appear to recede. Objects with more con­trast against their back­ground appear to advance.

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