January 2012
4 posts
Brush strokes carry a message whether you will it or not. The stroke is just like the artist at the time he makes it. All the certainties, all the uncertainties, all the bigness of his spirit and all the littleness are in it.
- Robert Henri from Art and Influence
Color is all relative, thus my reasoning for painting with a mud-puddle on my palette as opposed to mixing individual local colors as I need them. Every point in which you place the brush to sample the oils, you can find a color warmer, cooler, darker and lighter than your selection. If I reach the edges of my puddle, I can always expand outward as necessary. The puddle is a wonderful way to...
I remember working on a portrait painting once that was an artistic disaster. I was in complete despair and ready to start over. Jacob told me to slow down and deliberatly focus on each area, one at a time, starting with the worst area and working until it became the best area.
- Lessons in Classical Drawing, Juliette Aristides
The artist usually has no wish to duplicate appearances. He translates, indicates, and perhaps exaggerates. He goes to Nature for inspiration, but his work bears the stamp of his own personality. He is an interpreter rather than a copyist.
- Arthur L. Guptill (from Freehand Drawing Self-Taught)
December 2011
4 posts
Shaping the light
We represent light with gradations of tone, guided by observation and knowledge of the way it interacts with form. It’s very easy to miss the quality of the light if you’re just copying values. Instead you need to shape the light.
This means molding the amount of light for each form, building up more light in one place and tapering it off in another. It means making value...
The block in, is designed to be built around direct observation of the model. As a result you will begin to consciously experience the actual appearance of the model.
Connecting forms are the small, full forms that bridge the gaps between the various larger, fuller forms of the body. They are little transitions…nearly invisible, but nevertheless very important. Without them, the form would...
Think about the marks you want to make on the paper in front of you… the ones that bring you pleasure and satisfaction. You can’t control what other people think or if they’ll give you a job. You can only control your own actions and the work you produce. You have to be a little delusional to pursue a life in the arts, so throw caution to the wind and make pictures that excite you and hopefully...
Well, I start with an idea - like a magazine article or a poem and start by sketching idea down, normally the general shapes first, playing around with shapes and colours. Then I do a few sketches of the figures until I can get excited about them.
- Andy Lyons (illustrator)
October 2011
2 posts
We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.
- A sister’s eulogy for Steve Jobs
Hergé on colouring
With few exceptions, the colors are applied in flat areas, that is to say, without taking into account either the shadows or gradients.
This gives, in my opinion, more “clarity” to the drawings and also, I think, more freshness. I also believe that the concepts of shadows and Chiaroscuro (light-dark) are conventions. I prefer to side with solid colors, which has...
September 2011
3 posts
A guy on stage with a laptop?
Anyone could do that - Literally anyone.
- Kitty Daisy & Lewis
Drawing is risk. If risk is eliminated at any stage of the act it is no longer drawing.
- Lorne Coutts
When asked in interviews what makes for a successful composition Bresson’s answer was one word “…Geometry.” Bresson was educated as a painter by Andre Lhote, who wrote a number of treatises on painting. Both of these men, along with artists like Hopper, had very strong convictions about the design of their work which they inherited from earlier artists and years of study....
August 2011
3 posts
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
- Steve Jobs, Playboy 1985
Let’s go and get drunk on light again – it has the power to console.
- Georges Seurat
Playboy: If life is so purposeless, do you feel its worth living? Kubrick: Yes, for those who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces a man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the...
July 2011
4 posts
The BLAST rule
1. Use the biggest brush possible for a given passage.
2. Paint large shapes first, followed by small shapes.
3. Save your tonal and chromatic accents until the last.
4. Try to soften any edge that doesn’t need to be sharp.
5. Take time to get the center of interest right.
Or, the briefer version: (B.L.A.S.T.)
Big brushes.
Large to small.
Accents last.
Soften edges.
Take your time.
-...
‘It doesn’t matter how beautifully a thing is painted, it is no good if it isn’t right - it’s got to come out’ ; and again, ‘What does it matter how you do it? Paint it with a shovel if you can’t get your effect any other way.’
- Sir John Everett Millais, Underpaintings
“Before there were lenses, and long before there were cameras, what was considered “real” was very different. Realism is what you draw, not how you draw.”
- Bill Koeb from the comments of Leif Peng’s post about Ben Shahn
I draw and paint outdoors not to make easel pictures but to acquire experience and knowledge as reference for both the form and color of a locale and the people who live there or travel through it. This has helped me to handle a variety of subjects. It has further sustained my interest in illustration. The world exists as reference, and I try to use it. I constantly bring parts of it into my files...
June 2011
1 post
The realism of externals is a fault too common in our work to-day. We see too many pictures - in all branches of painting - where the interest does not lie where it professes to be, or where it should naturally be looked for, but is frittered away over the surfaces of things, on rich stuffs, or flowers, or weeds, or other minor points and accessories ; while the central intention, or what...
May 2011
3 posts
To preserve the colours fresh and clean in painting ; it must be done by laying in more colours, and not by rubbing them in when they are once laid ; and if it can be done they should be laid just in their proper places first, and not be touched again because the freshness of the colours is tarnished and lost, by mixing and jumbling them together ; for there are certain colours...
The three legged stool
How ‘what we KNOW’, ‘what we SEE’, and ‘what we FEEL’, should work in harmony to reinforce each other. \
There is a vast difference between basic recognition and a comprehensive grasp of FORM.
Understanding PERSPECTIVE is the key to our ability to translate our knowledge of form into images.
Perspective has a direct relationship...
There is always someone who comes up with a new angle on time tried landscape subjects, an arresting arrangement of familiar objects or a different aspect of a figure subject which stops the viewer on his tour of an exhibition. I suggest that those things are arrived at by more acute observation, by an increased awareness of the possibilities involved in any subject, but most of all by the process...
April 2011
4 posts
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is...
3 tags
One must be of one’s time and paint what one sees.
- Édouard Manet
2 tags
To successfully mix the colors you’ve interpreted certainly requires experience but follows this fairly simple logic originating with the local (say Red), recognizing the form type (say a sphere), the light most facing plane (therefore, the lightest in value and chroma) and the visibility of these properties as less light is received (therefore darker in value and less chromatic). This...
Until you can learn to ignore details, you won’t learn to draw.
Light shapes create the image; dark shapes create the pattern and the design. It is light shapes that give form; the dark shapes make the pattern.
Shadow shapes must describe either structure or the form on which it lies.
Consider drawing as a means of containing tone.
Make the paper more beautiful with every stroke added....
March 2011
9 posts
We are shaped and fashioned by what we love
- Goethe
Ishokauy, I say
Zorn palette
White, Ivory black, Yellow Ocher, and either Vermilion or Cadmium Red Light or Med.
A masterful drawing is more than a faithful copy of an object. It is a description of both something seen and something imagined. At its most successful, there is a balance of carefully observed naturalism grafted onto classical conventions of structure and design, Wether the subject is a majestic ensemble of complex layers or the most humble observations of detail, the wonderful drawings that...
… he never fails in giving a likeness, at once vivd, unmistakable, and pleasing. He paints the truth, and he paints it in love.” ~ Dr. John Brown speaking of Sir Henry Raeburn
employed a very limited palette. All one must do is look at a collection of his works and it will be quite obvious that the same few colors appear in every one of his paintings. His colors, which...
‘He thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence.’
- Stephen Bayley about Jonathan Ive
Everything which is alive reflects color and every reflection is a vibration. Hence, if one wishes to produce this living vibration one must resort to the use of pure basic colors and “build” with them in such a manner as to give this living effect and vibrancy.
- Nicolai Fechin
1 tag
Never despise small beginnings, and don’t belittle your own accomplishments. Remember them and use them as inspiration as you go on to the next thing. When you venture outside your comfort zone, wherever the starting point may be, it’s kind of a big deal.
- - Chris Guillebeau, Kind Of A Big Deal
February 2011
3 posts
1 tag
Pauline - font that looks a bit French - sacre bleu!
Nature is “trop verte et mal éclairée” - too green, and badly lit
- François Boucher
Visual Equivalence is not transcription but translation. You cannot make a copy of the real world in a picture or a photograph, but only mimic some of its visible qualities and the feelings it provokes.
~Stanley Meltzoff
January 2011
4 posts
3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain “perspective” relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick. Whereas if the film story has really gripped an audience they are “in” the picture in a kind of dreamlike “spaceless” space. So a good story will give you more dimensionality than you can ever cope with.
- Why 3D doesn’t work...
1 tag
Well, as a lawyer I can tell you that something that looks very simple indeed can be incredibly complicated, especially if I’m being paid by the hour. The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated
- I Shall Wear Midnight - T Pratchet
There is a fairy story about the prince and the black stones. On top of a crystal mountain is a princess, i.e., the thing of highest worth, the thing desired. The prince, the hero, the questing self, wants to get to the princess, the thing of highest worth. He starts to climb the mountain, which is crystal and therefore extremely slippery, difficult. On the way, he does all right for a bit. Then...
1 tag
Any object that has light falling on it becomes a source of light itself
December 2010
1 post
I think people are often quite unaware of their inner selves, their other selves, their imaginative selves, the selves that aren’t on show in the world. It’s something you grow out of from childhood onwards, losing possession of yourself, really. I think literature is one of the best ways back into that. You are hypnotised as soon as you get into a book that particularly works for you, whether...
November 2010
2 posts
Artmaking is deliberate and human
The creation of form in a painting is art, unlike mere transcription. Art is always the product of decision making and thought, not accident or mechanical transcription.
- Stapleton Kearns
Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday.
- Erich Fromm
October 2010
4 posts
One could say, exaggerating only slightly, that the hipster moment did not produce artists, but tattoo artists, who gained an entire generation’s arms, sternums, napes, ankles, and lower backs as their canvas. It did not produce photographers, but snapshot and party photographers: Last Night’s Party, Terry Richardson, the Cobra Snake. It did not produce painters, but graphic designers. It did not...
“In fairness, we are all sort of interchangeable except for our hair and eye color.”
- Kate Beaton
A drawing should feel like a live, open-ended experience in which you can amend your lines as you absorb more and more of your subject.
- James McMullan