rediscovering painting
Editorials
Sometimes I wonder
0955 days
Sometimes I wonder if I’m going down the wrong path with my art. So many great artists do the “traditional” thing. While I use a fairly traditional method, my results are not something that would fit into the nice, neat categories of still life, landscape, or portrait.
Sometimes.
Then there are other times when I question myself, censor myself. For example, I’m an atheist and I see a lot of god-culture crap around me. I see a lot of church-state issues. I see a lot of zealots trying to ignore facts to get their church’s viewpoints made law for all to follow in obeyance.
It’s hard for me to say, “Fuck it” and do what I want to do, say what I want to say. “Oh, better not say that, there might be repercussions,” and “Uh oh, that might piss off so and so,” and, worse yet, “I won’t do that even though I really want to because it might impact my art market.” I don’t even HAVE an art market yet, and I’m worrying about it.
Fuck me.
So I’m going to do this self-portrait series that I started yesterday and sketched out another idea for tonight’s painting (inspired by Hazel Dooney – again) and just be me. It’s called, “And Still I Persist.” It’s all about me. Isn’t it always?
So if I say, “Fuck your god,” then it’s no personal offense to you, really. Just fuck that god that keeps trying to creep into my secular society.
And if I say “fuck” a whole lot, then so fucking be it! It’s my artwork, it’s my world, and I have to live it. Besides, nobody cares, so I’m told. I’m also told that I should ignore everybody. So I’ll selectively take that bit of advice, thank you very much. I’ll just create my art in my own little hole until I’ve got about 20 pieces or so to start to share. Which should be in about a month.
In the mean time, I’ll still have the nagging thoughts. I’ll still censor myself, despite efforts to the contrary. I’ll still wonder. And I’ll still say “fuck” a lot.
Thinking about ditching ivory black
0960 days
Since doing my last painting in Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre, Ivory Black, and Titanium White, I’ve been giving thought to the limitations of that palette – both good and bad.
First, I felt my colors were really low key. But that forced me to focus on values more than color, which I definitely need. But I wanted a little more variety, more options in what I’m mixing. So I started to dig.
I Googled my palette on Google Image Search and came up with several examples of people using this palette, but also some people using additional colors. So I peered down the rabbit hole and continued my search through the maze. Slowly, the maze started to simplify and I came to some conclusions.
Mostly, I need to switch blacks. Ivory black was good but very dull. “These Are Days” has a couple of dull spots where I came back in to fix the value with Ivory Black vs. my original mixture of Alizarin Crimson and Ultramarine (“colorful black”). The colorful black was nice and shiny and didn’t dry as purple as it looked when it was wet.
I discovered that Payne’s Gray is (essentially) Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine. And it has a slightly purplish tone to it when you mix in white. That would have done wonders for the girl’s sweater (which, you can see, was actually a light purple, not yellow, but I couldn’t mix purple without blue, and Ivory Black insisted on making a neutral gray).
Then I wondered to myself, “Self, what about green?” Hmm, without blue, it seemed I was in a pickle. Then my rabbit hole ended on a thread about copying Velasquez – a limited palette of Titanium White, Ultramarine Blue, and Burnt Sienna. That’s it. You mix your black from Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna. You mix your greens my washing blue over the underpainting – done in Yellow Ochre.
A ha! There’s that sneaky little devil. I knew I’d find you, green!
Seems that ditching black altogether and mixing Payne’s Gray for myself from Ultramarine and Sienna is the way to go. Very simple, very clean, and might do wonders for me. Still won’t do orange very well (Burnt Sienna and Yellow Ochre don’t mix to a very orangey orange), but that’s okay. I don’t need it right now. And I’ll be able to do some good stuff for my next painting, concentrating more on values and less on color.
So long, Ivory Black, and thanks for the fish.
It’s still about creating
0981 days
I haven’t painted in 2 days… ACK! No, I’m not stopping or losing steam. I actually want to paint more and I have a lot of ideas for where I want my painting to go.
On Friday, a couple of friends came over and we jammed out in the garage. Bass/guitar/drums. It was a lot of fun. Never done that before. Need to do that more often.
Today I went on the Sacramento Second Saturday Art Walk. It wasn’t so good today. A lot of shit. But that’s okay, I really looked today. Really stopped and looked at the technique, the texture, the brush strokes. I learned, I talked to an artist, I enjoyed the old architecture of midtown Sactown. It was fun. It was art. So it counts as my daily art.
Blue and yellow don’t make green?
01575 days
I know there’s a book called, “Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green.” I’m not talking about that book. Well, sorta, in a roundabout way. I’m here to talk about colors a bit.
There’s this site I read quite a bit that has a lot of info about colors, written by some dude named Bruce MacEvoy. He seems to call bullshit on a lot of theory you see out there, and he’s a little arrogant himself, but what I like about him is that he’s actually done some experiments instead of just spouting theory. I really like how he showed the relationships on a color wheel, and how colors saturate/desaturate in a U-shape pattern when mixed. Then he actually got a mass spectrophotometer to measure wavelengths and plotted that on a curve!
http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/IMG/satcurve.gif
Magnificent data, and my #1 takeaway from this is that GREEN is actually a primary color because you can not make a bright green by mixing yellow and blue, and the graph is the proof. The more green you are, the lower the saturation. He even shows a mixed green vs. a tube green on a color wheel to show you the difference. And look how much separation there is between yellow and blue vs. the yellow and red.
I still like the “old masters” portrait palette of ochre, sienna, and black, but I also have been on a “cyan / magenta / yellow are the primary colors” kick, citing professional printing and computer technology as proof that CMYK works. And it does, but we don’t paint in pure, brilliant pigments in a halftone. But the proof is in the pudding, and I am swayed by rigorous, scientific evidence. The only downside I can see is that Bruce uses watercolors where I prefer oils. Not sure how much of a difference that will make.
6 points for a perfect likeness
11689 days
I read somewhere that if you get these 6 points placed properly, the rest of the portrait will fall into place. Off hand, I don’t think I necessarily agree that this is all you need… but I think it goes a little deeper.
Six points:
- pupils (2)
- nostrils (2)
- corners of mouth (2)
I think that’s crap. I did a bunch of research for this blog entry and nothing was very conclusive. Though I can tell you by looking at caricatures that those six points aren’t right. You can also tell because a simple mask around the eyes can fool you. I made some rounds to some pretty intense stuff: facial recognition algorithms, art books, plastic surgery sites, and some other stuff that I’m sure I’m forgetting.
Nobody has any answers. Nobody that can prove it, anyway. I thought I had it in the facial recognition software algorithms but it turns out that they have a really low success rate and there are several competing algorithms/methodologies being used. Bother.
Then I used good ‘ol epidemiological evidence: I looked at people. I looked up close. I looked from afar. I looked at old, fuzzy photographs. What I figured out is that the general shadowy shape of your face is really the key. I can show you in a drawing of myself from a photo: you can’t see my pupils, nostrils, or the corners of my mouth, but you can tell it’s me. heck, most of the picture is the back of my head! But you can still tell it’s me.
I would really like to believe that it’s as easy as those 6 points. And, certainly, if you get them way off, the portrait won’t look right. But that doesn’t mean they are the 6 points for a likeness. Instead, I think the underlying bone structure has more to do with it.
The shadow under the brow is very telling for male/female and it’s also very distinctive for race. I think it’s also very unique to the person, therefore essential for a likeness.
The shadow around and under the nose is also very distinctive and also can determine gender and race. My nose is most definitely very “me” and can probably distinguish me from a mile away. But not necessarily the location of my nostrils – more like the way the light falls across my nose.
Finally, the shape of the shadow under the top lip and under the bottom lip are very distinguishable.
Of course, the face has many other bony structures and many other shadows, and you can be bottom-lit as well, but the same general bony and fleshy structures casting shadows around the eyes, nose, and mouth will be very apparent.
Try this: take a picture of yourself where you can’t see the 6 points. Take a picture at a really extreme angle that barely captures your face at all. Then go further and use The GIMP or Photoshop to reduce the colors to only a few – or 2 (black and white). I’ll be you can STILL make out the likeness.
Here’s another experiment: find some old pictures in a photo album where all the facial detail is obscured and you can only see shadows across the face – can you still make out Grandma Jean? Yup, sure as heck, you can.
Keep these things in mind as you try to get a likeness. Watch out for the bigger shapes and get those right – and the details will take care of themselves.
Atheism and art
01706 days
Unrelated to this blog topic but important: a lot of artists say they find inspiration in God or they Thank God for their successes or whatever. Yeah, whatever. You can still make good art and you can still be inspired if you are an atheist. Just because you’re smart and don’t give in to a magical “old white dude” with a beard in the sky watching over you doesn’t mean that you’re devoid of inspiration. The world is beautiful. Go see it and capture it in your art. No, it didn’t need a creator to be beautiful. Put down the pencil, stop typing, and go take a midnight stroll around your neighborhood. See all that stuff? It’s there because MAN created it (the architecture, the landscape design, the park design, etc.), not some magical Zulu dude in the sky (which is really silly – why don’t planes and/or astronauts fly into heaven?). The flora and fauna survived because they adapted over millions of years.
Have you drawn today? Have you painted today? If you have, thank yourself, not the magical Jeebus in the sky. (kudos if you got the Homer Simpson reference)
Heinlein on success
01711 days
Robert A. Heinlein, one of my favorite authors, has 5 rules that he gave at the Navel Academy to the midshipmen way back in the 1960s. I’d like to share that with you because it totally applies to artists of all sorts.
First, you must create art. This eliminates 50% of people that want to be artists – most dream but don’t act. Action is the way to success. If 100 people want to be an artist, 50 will be left because they’ll actually create salable art.
Second, you must FINISH a piece of art. You can’t just have stuff started and sitting around your studio. You must actually produce a finished piece. Drop another 50% – only 25 people will actually finish a piece of art.
Third, you must eventually call it “done.” You can’t tweak forever, you can’t have excuse after excuse why you’re not better than <insert famous artist here>. Drop yet another 50% – only about 12 people will actually stop giving excuses and call their masterpiece “done.”
Fourth, you must bring your work to the public – submit to a gallery, create a website, sell on eBay, whatever. You have to get it out there. If you don’t put it up for sale, you won’t sell it. We’re down to 6 of the original 100 now.
Fifth, you must persist. Your first piece of art might not be very good, but you must persist. It has been said that your first 1000 pieces of art will just plain stink. So what? Hurry up and get your first 1000 out of the way! This leaves 3 people that might actually have some tenacity.
Sixth (and this is my addition), you must try AGAIN. You must produce more art. This will leave about 1 person that gets this far. So we have 1/100, or 1% of people, that will get this far. 1% of people! So next time you’re rationalizing why you can’t make it out to your studio, think of this – if you don’t, you’re part of the 99% of people that will never succeed as an artist! Dont’ do it to yourself – get out and start pumping out the paintings!
Can’t draw? Call it “abstract”
01740 days
by shuste73
in Editorials
I’ve been getting more and more into abstract art over the past few years. I don’t even know what the big draw is for me, I just like it. Abstract art, though, like realist art, has its share of really poorly done work.
I live in the Sacramento area and I go to what’s called “Sacramento Second Saturday” (ugh – their website is TERRIBLE – as an aside, I offered to redo their website about three years ago and they declined, saying an overhaul was imminent; it never materialized) every month (or at least I try to if I don’t have other obligations on a Saturday night). A year ago I discovered the W Gallery in the midtown area on one of the art walks. The primary artists in the gallery are the Watt sisters (thus the W in the name of the gallery), and I was specifically drawn to Lora Watts. Her abstract works just moved me in a way that I hadn’t enjoyed for a long while. She was there (most artists are there for Second Saturday) and I chatted with her for a minute or so – she used to be a realist painter but had recently moved to abstract.
And it showed.
Just last week I was on the Second Saturday art walk again and I discovered a new gallery (midtown Sacramento is a happening place!) – well, a new location for an older gallery, Phoenix framing and art. I’d never been to the old gallery because it was too far off the beaten path so I decided to check out their new location. The entire upstairs was dedicated to Ruth Truesdell, who had some fantastic pieces on display. Some were just okay and you could tell that she spent a lot of time experimenting, but a couple of her abstracts were amazing. I spent a couple minutes talking to her about one piece in particular and she said it had over a gallon of paint on it to get that fabulous glowing / movement feel to it. I’d found my fave of the night.
On the other hand, I’ve seen SO MANY poorly done abstracts that I just sigh and usually don’t offer a second glance when it comes to abstracts. A real test of an abstract artist is this: can you actually draw, too? Do you understand design principles, too? Abstract art is just that: an abstraction of something. A thought, an idea, a face, whatever. It’s taking an emotional aspect and portraying it. My theory that “the art is the idea” continues here: I don’t care if it’s abstract or hyper-realist – if it stinks, it stinks.
Picasso is much-maligned among non-artists. “A kid could draw that,” they say. Well, maybe (but probably not) they could but what you’re missing are two vitally important things:
- Picasso is a very good artist even if you don’t look at his abstract (cubist) works
- Picasso’s cubist works are culturally and artistically significant, especially Guernica
Jackson Pollock is similarly maligned because it looks like so many scribbles and drips on canvas. Oh, to the uneducated, maybe, but when you understand the times and what he was trying to do (and achieved), it’s genius. The INTENTION is the art – more specifically, achieving the intention is the art.
So next time you see some scribbles that some 2-bit huckster is intending to pass off as “abstract art,” go back to your early art training and remember the elements and principles of art: {space, shape, line, texture, value, and color} composed using {space, division, balance, unity, and emphasis}. A scribble or a blob won’t have most of these, or at least won’t have any discernible intelligence behind them. Quietly scoff to yourself and move along until you find yourself a Lora Watts or a Ruth Truesdell and are able to be happy in the presence of real abstract art again.
Facial proportions in 13/8 steps
01747 days
…or make that “phi,” which I’ll go into in a moment. First, let’s discuss facial proportions.
Facial proportions
A lot has been written on facial proportions. In the probably 10 books I own on portraits + all the ones I’ve browsed through in the bookstore and/or library – PLUS all of the guides I’ve seen on the Internet, NOBODY MATCHES PERFECTLY. That is, no two facial proportion references match up to each other.
- Is the hairline at 1/3 up from the brow? Or is it 1/2 up from the brow to the top of the head?
- Is the eyeline at the middle of the head or the browline?
- Is the ear at the mouth line or the nose line?
- Do I believe John Howard Sanden
or Burne Hogarth
? Or neither?
- etc., etc., etc.
Who’s right? None of the artists I’ve seen are right – and I can say this because almost all of them reference their own drawings when they point out proportions, not pictures of real faces. Duh! They all mean well buy they’re just giving you their personal rules of thumb. Let’s go beyond opinion and do some research on beauty – including some good resources for artists, plastic surgery information! After all, how do plastic surgeons know just how long to make a nose or just how much to tweak to make a face pretty again? They certainly don’t reference their favorite book on portraiture by Douglas Graves
Phi
Okay, back to “phi” or the cryptic 13/8 reference in the title. Phi is a Greek name for what’s also known as “the golden mean” or the perfect ratio or even “Fibonacci.” If you’re into graphic design, you’ve GOT to check this out! It’s a sequence of numbers that, one added to the next makes the third. For example, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, … to infinity. If you divide the numbers, they get closer and closer to the golden mean, or 1.618:1. Keep that in mind: nearly 1/3 but not quite.
As an aside, my brother-in-law has a Mopar book and it concludes with the Chrysler 300M designers. When asked about the bold design, they noted that the car has Fibonacci written all over it. Indeed. In case you didn’t get it, I think the car is stunning and very masculine, a standout in the crowd by any measure (like it or not).
Portraits and the golden mean
Okay, so what do portraits have to do with some dead Italian guy and Chrysler 300Ms? The human face is literally sculpted out of the golden mean. Not thirds, not quarters, not halves… 1.618:1. Check out this reference image from PhiMatrix.com:
http://www.phimatrix.com/images/phi-woman.jpg
If you take the tip of her nose to the back of her head and find the 1.618:1 mark, it’s right at her ear (the “ear hole,” if you will). Starting from that line, draw another 1.618:1 mark and it’s where her neck meets her chin. Draw another one and it’s the back of her eye. Again, and it’s the front of her eye and the back of her mouth. AGAIN and you’re at the bridge of her nose. Finally, one more time and you’re at the front of her teeth and the septum under her nose.
Can you say, “wow?” I knew you could. <pulls on sweater and changes shoes, goes to see King Friday>
And I didn’t even go over the horizontal lines! This picture could even be split into even more 1.618:1 sections ad infinitum and you could keep finding perfectly matched features (of course, the more attractive the person, the closer to perfect, which is why learning to see is so important!).
Let’s look again:
Holy cannoli, Batman, do you think we’re on to something? If I see one more reference that says that the iris is 1/3 the width of the eye or that the pupil is 1/3 the width of the pupil, I’m going to scream. I mean it, I’ll do it… I will! Watch me! AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!!
Observations
Okay, I’m better now. But I think you get my point – and I think I have 2 key points that I would like you to take away from this article:
- The proportions of the human face are 1.618:1 all over the place
- You have to use that as a reference and really measure for yourself unless your only subjects are supermodels (keep dreaming)
Keep learning to see and keep on questioning authority. Even me. I’m wrong at least 38.2% of the time (yes, that’s that’s the other portion of the 1:1.618 ratio, or slightly more than 1/3, which is NOT a good number for facial proportions).
How to be a hack artist, or “amazing portrait secrets!”
01758 days
Got your attention? Good.
The topic of cheating may surprise non-artists. Artists are those whiz kids that could pick up a pencil and bang out a realistic drawing in no time flat, while our stuff was barely above a toddler’s first scribblings, right?
Wrong.
A surprising number of artists actually do most of their work by “cheating.” I’ve seen quite a few methods, including:
- tracing
- gridding (grid method)
- camera obscura
- opaque projectors
- carbon transfers
- digital image printed directly on canvas
I could probably name more but these are the most common ways to cheat. Have you seen those Google Adsense ads saying “your portrait from your picture, just $75, done in 2 days?” Most of these places use one or a combination of these techniques. Amazing portrait secrets, indeed.
- Tracing
Tracing typically involves a “light table” that’s a piece of plexiglass (semi-opaque) on top of a box with a light in it. You place the original on the table and your paper above it, and you can typically see just enough (with some peeking under the top sheet to make sure you’re staying on track) to get a great likeness. Then you finish the shading, etc., on your own. - Carbon transfer
A variant of tracing is using a carbon transfer. You place tracing paper over the original photo and trace, similar to the light table technique. You clearly don’t want the finished product on tracing paper, though, so you would then place a sheet of carbon paper between your final drawing surface and the tracing paper, then re-trace over your lines on the tracing paper, resulting in a perfect likeness on the high quality paper (or canvas, if you so choose). - Grid (gridding technique)
Anyone that’s ever done a “Skillogram” in a crossword puzzle book will be familiar with this technique.
Gridding is BY FAR the most common technique I’ve seen used and taught to students. Heck, it was even a project in an Art 101 class I took in college! What you do here is you either directly grid over your reference image or place an acetate/transparency sheet with a grid on it directly over the reference image (secure with tape or whatever). Then create a similar grid on your final surface, be it bristol board, sketch paper, canvas, or what have you. You can have equal size grids or you can have different sizes to enlarge (or reduce) the final image. - Camera obscura
If you don’t know, a camera obscura is simply a box with a pinhole and a mirror, reflecting onto a glass surface. You can put a grid onto the glass surface to create a variant of the grid technique. Some examples don’t cite a grid, in which this is a variant of the tracing cheat. Some people will attempt to assuage their guilt by saying “it’s been proven that Vermeer used a camera obscura so why can’t I?” Others will say “the great masters would use grids to enlarge their work, so why can’t I?”- You’re not a “great master” of the Renaissance
- The “great masters” spent a great deal of time learning to see properly, and learning to draw properly
- The “great masters” used a grid on THEIR OWN WORK, not on a photograph
- Opaque projector
I don’t remember where, but I read an article about a portrait artist that used an opaque projector. He would take reference photos (his own or the client’s) and place on them on the projector, which would project onto his canvas. Here’s the trick: blur the projector entirely out of focus, then lay in your foundation colors. When dry, focus 1/4 of the way and paint in additional details. Do it again at 1/2 focus, 3/4 focus, then finalize at full focus. Voilà ! Now you have a perfect likeness, even with subtle colors and maybe even a perfect replica of that difficult sofa pattern! Amazing portrait secret, huh? - Digital transfer
A decidedly modern way to cheat at drawing is to simply send off your photo to a lab that will print the image onto a canvas for you. You just take it home and paint directly over the printed image with oil paint, pastels, etc. Another amazing portrait secret.
My thoughts on “cheating”
I’m sure that professional artists (defined as working artists that are making money) can pump out some fairly high quality images pretty fast using these techniques. These techniques probably make the artists a lot of money – and for a lot of people, making money as an artist is very fulfilling and they don’t mind the cheat. Then again, I’d hesitate to really call them “artists,” and I’m sure that’s bound to really irk some people that use these techniques. But that’s how I feel so take it for what it’s worth.
Does it matter?
We’ve all seen those Google ads promising a quick portrait in oils from your photo. I really believe that most people are completely satisfied with the end-product and really couldn’t care less about the method employed getting there. If it does matter to you, then look at some samples of the finished product compared to the reference photo. If the likeness is dead on, without a stray hair’s difference between the original and the final “work of art,” then move on. You can tell by the lifeless gaze, the carbon copy work if the artist employed a cheat as the primary method of doing the portrait. The old adage applies, “you get what you pay for.”
Okay, smartie-pants, how’s it done, then?
What *I* do is the sight-size method. I hold up my pencil and relate, compare, mark out guidelines, and gradually work up a portrait. It is not easy and it takes a long time. I dare say that because it takes a long time, I would have to be much better than I am now to do this as my full time job. And therein lies the hitch: do it the “right” way and create some beautiful works that you can really be proud of, or “cheat” your way to success and profits. Perhaps there’s a middle ground.
A great way to “learn to see” is to actually step back and do the basics, which I’ll cover in a future article, including blind contours, modified blind contours, full contours, and moving on to advanced stuff like doing the Bargue plates (you can see examples at the appropriately entitled site, Learning to See).
I’m going to do a series on “cheats,” actually employing each cheat that I can (I’m not sending off to have a photograph printed on a canvas) and hopefully I can get some people to post their results along with me. Barring that, hopefully someone tries the technique and gets hooked, wanting to learn how to do it right and sets off on their own art adventure.