painting technique

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Avoiding the pasted-on look

16 August 2009 in art technique, painting by David | No comments

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.

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Oil priming a panel

12 October 2008 in David's work, art materials, artists, oil painting by David | 2 comments

After doing some prim­ing this evening, I thought it might be help­ful to describe how I do it. My method is based on Rob Howard’s rec­om­men­da­tions for using the primer from Stu­dio Prod­ucts. I’m using their white lead/black oil primer, now dis­con­tin­ued. The approach should work for any oil primer, such as the newer SP tita­nium black oil primer, or the lead white oil primers from Williams­burg or Doak.

  1. This needs to be done in a well-ventilated room.
  2. Cut the panel to size. Sand the edges down so that they are smooth and slightly rounded (chamfered).
  3. Clean the sur­face of the panel thor­oughly with dena­tured alco­hol. Give it a few min­utes to evap­o­rate away.
  4. Apply a layer of primer with a knife. I use a plas­tic palette knife. You can also use one of those wide plas­tic house paint­ing knives, but I find the sharp cor­ners leave grooves. You could also use a brush, but it would be slow work. If the primer is too thick to spread eas­ily, you can thin it slightly with sol­vent. Apply the primer quite thinly.
  5. Take a soft fan brush and wet it with sol­vent. Lightly feather it over the primed sur­face, smooth­ing out all of the bumps and grooves. When the brush picks up primer, wipe it with a cloth, wet it again, and con­tinue until you’ve smoothed the entire surface.
  6. Let the panel dry lean­ing face-in against a wall. This will help keep dust from falling on it. Allow about 4–5 days to dry.
  7. Repeat with a sec­ond layer.
  8. Allow at least a month, prefer­ably sev­eral months, to cure. It’s best to do sev­eral pan­els at a time, sev­eral times a year, so that you always have a cou­ple of pan­els in pre­ferred sizes ready to go.

Oil primed sur­faces are very pleas­ant to work on, although it takes time to get used to how smooth and non-absorbent they are.

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Flat space

21 April 2008 in art technique, artists, painting by David | 2 comments

Some 20th-century real­ists, such as David Hock­ney, tend to paint a blank wall as, well, blank. By that I mean that they mix up some color and paint that wall a flat tone. No tex­ture, no color vari­a­tion, just one plain color. If the blank wall has, say, a cast shadow falling on it, they will paint that, but the shadow will also be just one undif­fer­en­ti­ated color, just like the light por­tion of the wall. Skies, table­tops, streets—even skin tones—tend to get the same treatment.

That doesn’t work for me. First of all, it’s not “real­is­tic,” in that human vision (at least as I expe­ri­ence it as a human with func­tion­ing vision) never has areas of flat color. If I look at a plain wall, it has con­stant vari­a­tions in hue, chroma, and value. I just don’t see any flat color there.

That doesn’t mean the artist can’t paint it flat if that’s the way it looks to him or her, or if that evokes a cer­tain feel­ing the artist wants to ref­er­ence. But the big prob­lem with flat­ness is that it dis­tances me emo­tion­ally from the paint­ing. Flat color pushes me away. It says, “there isn’t any­thing to see here—this space inten­tion­ally left blank.” A flat area of color empha­sizes the real­ity that the paint­ing itself is flat. The paint­ing becomes less real­ist and more abstract, in a way that I find unap­peal­ing. Flat paint­ings are more “mod­ern” (in the sense of being more 20th cen­tury), but that’s not a sell­ing point as far as I am con­cerned. I like sim­plic­ity in paint­ings, but not that kind of simplicity.

By con­trast, tex­ture pulls me into the paint­ing. It can be used to cre­ate a sense of mys­tery, as in the sub­tle darks of a Rem­brandt paint­ing. It com­mu­ni­cates more about the visual real­ity that the painter is attempt­ing to lure me into observing. It gives me a rea­son to spend more time look­ing, and from the stand­point of a painter, that is never a bad thing.

As a result, I spend lots of time with the “blank” parts of my paint­ings. I typ­i­cally use mul­ti­ple lay­ers and think about how much tex­ture and color vari­a­tion to apply. Some blank areas get more atten­tion than detail areas. That doesn’t show so much in a pho­to­graph of the painting—but that’s just one more rea­son why the orig­i­nal is bet­ter than any repro­duc­tion. And that, from the stand­point of a painter, is an excel­lent thing.

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