Day for Night Sketching

“Day for night” is moviemaking technique where a night scene is shot during the day. The film image is darkened and tinted with blue to appear as though the scene were shot at night.



It was used so often in B-movies and westerns that it has become known in France as nuit américaine ("American night").

Is it possible to do a daytime drawing that suggests moonlight?

In a previous post, we looked at the depiction of moonlight in terms of color, exploring why moonlight appears blue.

Moonlight has another important quality: simplicity and softness. In limited light, the eyes shift to what is known as scotopic vision, where the photoreceptors in the retina can only perceive simple, large areas of tone, with uncertain boundaries. You can see this for yourself when you try to make out individual twigs or stones on a moonlit night. Only the most generalized shapes in the dark areas are visible, and what details are apparent tend to be in the lightest areas.

You can suggest these qualities even in a daytime drawing by consciously suppressing detail and softening edges in the darker areas. In the drawing of the Williams College Chapel in Williamstown, Massachusetts, I looked at the scene and tried to suppress detail in the shadows, grouping them together into a simple, soft mass.
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Wikipedia “day for night,” link

Movie still courtesy film art website, link.

Transmitting Emotion

There are many ways to define art. Some definitions revolve around concepts of beauty or pleasure or creativity or imitation or individuality.

But one useful definition is based on the principle of the transmission of emotion from one person to another.


Consider the following statements:

“Art is the activity by which a person, having experienced an emotion, intentionally transmits it to others.” —Leo Tolstoy

“The purpose of the painter is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him.” — George Inness

“The person who can communicate his emotions to the souls of others is the artist.” — Alphonse Mucha

“Art must contain a human experience, and, through a personality, skilfully communicate this experience in an understandable language to the greatest number of thinking people for the longest length of time.” — Frank Reilly

There are a few corollaries to this conception of art-making. The artist must truly feel something for art to be possible. Charles Hawthorne said, “If you are not going to get a thrill, how can you give someone else one?”

This definition of art doesn’t concern itself with the formal qualities of the work. It doesn’t matter if the artwork has elegant compositional structure or graceful lines or the Golden Mean; it simply has to evoke in the viewer the emotion that originally drove the creator.

The artist isn’t the only one who matters. The viewer is part of the equation. Art can’t just be an isolated expressive activity that one person does to amuse himself.

The success of art can be measured by the strength of its effect on the audience. What do you say about your favorite movie?: “It made me laugh, it made me cry.”

What kinds of emotions are appropriate for art? Joy? Terror? Wonder? Uneasiness? All are legitimate, though Tolstoy holds in the highest regard the feeling of universal brotherhood.

Tolstoy is interested in authentic emotions. He excludes sarcasm, irony, cynicism, melodrama, and sentimentality, all of which are counterfeit emotions. He also excludes work that is merely technical or intellectual.

The emotion-transmission definition has universal strength because it doesn’t provide any limits on subject matter, technique, or degree of realism. Nor does it even specify the art form. It could apply as much to animation or writing or dancing or music as to painting.

But it has its limitations. The chemistry of emotional infection is very subjective. What moves one person may not move another. Tolstoy hated late Beethoven, Wagner, and opera in general, while most people find them deeply moving.

And the definitions don’t account for work created by hermit-like artists who do authentic work that is never appreciated by an audience. Does an artist have to be conscious of the audience to be effective at transmitting emotion?

This notion of art ruled most of the 18th and 19th centuries until it was swept away by aestheticism and modernism. The image at the top of the post is by Caspar David Friedrich, one of the German romantics.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the definitions of art have been thorougly deconstructed. I believe we need to go back and dust off early ideas that lay behind the great masterpieces we admire from the past, and see if they still work for us today. I’d love to hear what you think.
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Further reading:
One of the best articulations of this aesthetic philosophy was written by Leo Tolstoy in his essay, “What is Art,” (1896) link.
Wikipedia on “What is Art” link.
A recent movement in art, founded on many of these ideas, is called Emotionalism. http://www.emotionalism.org/

The Coppersmith

Merchants in the inner markets of Fes, Morocco get their supplies by donkey, not by truck or motorcycle. The donkeys jostled against me, nearly knocking me over. The smell of the spice and perfume filled the air. Veiled women shyly hid their faces.


After an hour of walking through the labryrinth I came to Seffarine Square. Tiny shopfronts crowded the small opening. A coppersmith named Hamid Aziz hammered a pot.



I sat in the middle of the square on an orange crate and began a watercolor. But I forgot to bring water! Hamid poured some for me into a chipped glass from a silver teapot that he kept beside him.



A few bewildered tourists stopped to watch, but most of the commentary behind me was in Arabic. When I finished the sketch, I showed it to Hamid and his friends.

Arc of Hollows

When drawing the shoulder area of the torso, watch for the “arc of hollows.”


These pits or indentations follow a curving line from the pit of the neck to beneath the clavicle. The line curves along the leading edge of the deltoid and ends in the armpit.


The arc of hollows is marked in yellow on this study of a reference sculpture.


The hollows are marked with X’s here in Michelangelo’s David.

This idea came from Drawing the Head & Figure, by Jack Hamm, 1963, page 70.

Ahead in 2009

On this first day of 2009, I’d like to give you a little preview of some of the upcoming topics.

We’ll take a look at (in no particular order):
Spotlighting
Fibonacci
Day for Night Sketching
The Prix de Rome
The Form Principle
Ecorche Figures
Cast Shadows
The Ebauche
Getting Kids to Pose
Premixing Color
The Pathetic Fallacy
Painting Wet Streets
Spherical Panoramas

Plus visits to new art schools and museum exhibitions.

The goal of this blog is to explore art-related ideas that are completely new to me, along with topics that are review. l’ve always felt that learning about art consists of 10% of new ideas, and 90% relearning the same things I already knew, but in a new light.

I also believe that our experience of art weaves itself into every aspect of our lives, so you can expect offbeat sidelights into contemporary culture and philosophy, or strange new revelations of science.

COMMENTS
The big fun of all this blogging is hearing from you, and I thank you for all the great insights, comments, questions, arguments, and kind words you’ve shared over the last year and a half. Even if I don’t get a chance to acknowledge each of your comments, I’ve learned as much from you as you have from me.

And for those of you who read without posting comments, that’s perfectly OK. I don’t believe in the word “lurking,” and I think it’s fine to read a post and not say anything.

Last night we got hit with a huge batch of Asian spam blog comments. That’s usually the only thing that I’ve ever had to delete. If a lot more spam comes in, I may have to set up the letter recognition step.

ART BY COMMITTEE
Many of you have asked to resume Art By Committee. I had to take a break only because it was getting so popular, and was taking a lot of time and a lot of my megabyte allottment from Google. At some point we can try it again, and we’ll see if it’s manageable. The results of your work are certainly amazing, and I’m always grateful for your effort.

To each of you I send my best wishes for the new art year. May the muse of inspiration be always at your side.

Foggy Weather

Most folks like sunny, cloudless days, but artists often prefer fog, rain, and clouds. This sketch in Maine wouldn’t have been half as interesting on a day with a clear blue sky.



The water was glassy, just one semi-tone darker than the sky. Everything was gray except those red details at the waterline. All the color of the far boats dropped out. The distant sailboat is just a ghost.

As with overcast light, there is little modeling of the form, because white light is coming from overhead in all directions.
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Related posts on overcast light, part 1 and part 2

Trost Richards Exhibition in PA

William Trost Richards was a 19th Century American realist landscape painter that we've looked at in various previous posts (Called Away, Trost Richards Watercolor,



The Arnold Art Gallery at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania will be featuring a new exhibition called "William Trost Richards: Land and Sea," from January 9 to February 15, 2009.

The artist was a native of Philadelphia who continued his studies in Florence, Rome and Paris. In the 1850s, he befriended Frederic Church and Thomas Cole and became a member of the Hudson River School. By the 1870s, the artist became interested in the American landscape movement known as luminism, which explored, among other concerns, the immensity of the sea and the untapped frontiers of America. The show, titled William Trost Richards: Land and Sea, will feature oil paintings, small studies in watercolor, and pencil on loan from private collections, New York City galleries and several regional institutions.

The Suzanne H. Arnold Art Gallery is open at no charge on Wednesdays from 5 to 8 p.m., Thursdays and Fridays from 1 to 4:30 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and by appointment for tour groups. For more information, please call 717-867-6445.

Arnold Art Gallery Website, link. (Note: I don't know what images are in the show; the picture on this post is just a representative example of his work.)
Metropolitan Museum collection of Trost Richards, link.
Large Trost Richards image database, link.

Really Useful

When the art blog "Making a Mark" handed out the year-end awards, I was thrilled that GurneyJourney was recognized with the "The FAQs and Answers Really Useful Medal."

If you haven't checked out Making a Mark, give it a visit. It is full of practical and helpful information, not only about picturemaking, but exhibitions, art resources, and developing an art career. (Thanks, Katherine)

Dinotopia Map

Treasure Island began with a map that Robert Louis Stevenson sketched for his nephew on a rainy day.

Dinotopia also began with a map—though in the first map I called the island “Panmundia.” Once I had an idea of the overall shape and the kind of physical geography I wanted for the island, I sketched the island quickly in markers. The mountain and canyon relief is accentuated by an imaginary light source from the from the upper left. The original painting, below, was rendered in oil on illustration board.

It’s a good idea to add more place names than the ones you’re planning to use in a given story. This gives the feeling that the world exists beyond the boundaries of what you have revealed so far, and it also sets the stage for sequels.

In the most recent map of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, drawn with a dip pen in a mid-19th century style, I added dozens of new town names. More about that process at the previous post on "Place Names."

How to Sleep in Airports

In sympathy with people who are stuck in airports on their return journeys, here are some tips for getting some sleep if you have to spend the night in the airport departure lounge.

Airport benches are designed with rigid arms to prevent people from stretching out to sleep, so it takes some ingenuity to get comfortable.

I spent a sleepless night in London last month. There was a little community of sleepers sneaking glances at each other to see how their neighbors solved the sleep problem. Some made beds out of their luggage carts or their suitcases.

Even though strangers didn’t say a word to each other, there was an unspoken bond between us as we triumphed together over the little trials of our humanity.