“To draw does not mean only to reproduce an outline, drawing does not consist only of line; drawing is more than this, it is expression, it is the inner form, the structure, the modelling. After that what is left? Drawing includes seven-eighths of what constitutes painting.” - Ingres”
Doing the best I can every step of the way imagining the cheek emerging of from the linen
“When thinking about rendering, you’re making a scale model version of the world.
You have to think about it differently.
You have to conceive of it differently.
Our eyes when when looking at reality and when looking at our painting are looking at two different things. One is an illusion and one is not and so we have to enter into the world of the painting.”
— Joshua LaRock from the American Painting Magazine
“It was a very arbitrary thing I don’t know what triggered it now except I was just getting sick admiring all this stuff and not being that good it was this two things that freed me I guess from the tyranny of published excellence or something” — David Grove from the Sidebar podcast talking about how he found his own illustrative style
“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
(via makenosound)
(via bendelaney)
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 also limit your color choices if you are looking to control certain aspects of your painting process. There is also no absolute color to start painting flesh with. Your first choice will then dictate what the next value or color needs to be. A slight move across the palette shifts the overall temperature of your skin, but the inherent local relationships will remain the same.
- Muddy Colors, The Mud of Frodo
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)
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 configurations within the linear structure of the drawing by allocating differing intensities of light according to the topography of form
Another important skill to work on is that of shaping your tonal progressions. In a truly naturalistic drawing style, each patch of tone has a specific shape. Tapering, curving, slanted, and asymmetrical shapes are the rule.
Whenever I draw on the inside I try and remember and obey the following rule: Each form to be shaded must first be recognised as such and its shape in space understood. The light progression that cuts across the form just also be seen and carefully studied. Then a corresponding tonal progression is made in the drawing to represent that specific form as it’s conveyed by that light progression.
- Anthony Ryder (The artist’s guide to figure drawing)