Choosing an Interpretation

How do you keep from being overwhelmed by nature when you're painting in the wild?

When I start a session, I usually make some decisions right away about how to simplify a subject. Even if my goal is to capture the perspective and the forms pretty much as I see them, I often make some decisions about interpreting value and color. 

For example, here's the scene I'm looking at next to the gouache painting I do from observation:

I choose to flatten the tones of the far trees and translate the actual colors into more basic warm and cool colors, sacrificing a lot of blue and green.

I hoped that transposing the color scheme into this elemental range would capture my feeling about this farmyard surviving another winter, ready to awaken into spring.

I made another sacrifice as well. (Link to video) The only sketchbook I had with me was full, so I had to paint one sketch over another. Doing this requires "seeing through" the paper to the painting on the other side of it, and finding it all with the brush.

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This video is a sample from "The Living Sketchbook, Vol. 2: Metro North," which releases one week from today. Check out the first volume, "Boyhood Home," available now at the App Store and Google Play.

“Gurney’s new "Living Sketchbook" app combines multiple creative disciplines (painting, writing, filming, audio) into one seamless artistic experience that anyone can use with ease. Well, done!”

—Scott Burdick.

Camera Technique Stretches Time

An unusual camera technique developed by Jay Mark Johnson combines multiple viewpoints and moving objects into a single image with a stretched background. 

The slit-scan camera technique, which he calls "photographic timelines," freezes and compresses moving objects. The faster they move, the more they're compressed.

This is the reverse of what we're accustomed to seeing, namely detailed, stable backgrounds with blurred moving objects.

Johnson's technique also works wonders with dancers, distorting their forms like melting glass or taffy.

Via Singularity Hub
Explanation of the method on Design Boom.
Jay Mark Johnson's website

Interpreting in Pen and Ink

How would you translate this photograph into a pen and ink drawing? 

Here's the way Charles Maginnis, a writer from 1903, analyzed the problem. 

"First of all, then, does the subject, from the point of view at which the photograph is taken, compose well? It cannot be said that it does. The vertical lines made by the two towers are unpleasantly emphasized by the trees behind them. The tree on the left would be much better reduced in height and placed somewhat to the right, so that the top should fill out the awkward angles of the roof formed by the junction of the tower and the main building. The trees on the right might be lowered also, but otherwise permitted to retain their present relation.The growth of ivy on the tower takes an ugly outline, and might be made more interestingly irregular in form."

"The next consideration is the disposition of the values. In the photograph the whites are confined to the roadway of the bridge and the bottom of the tower. This is evidently due, however, to local color rather than to the direction of the light, which strikes the nearer tower from the right, the rest of the walls being in shadow. While the black areas of the picture are large enough to carry a mass of gray without sacrificing the sunny look, such a scheme would be likely to produce a labored effect. 

"Two alternative schemes readily suggest themselves: First, to make the archway the principal dark, the walls light, with a light half-tone for the roof, and a darker effect for the trees on the right. Or, second, to make these trees themselves the principal dark, as suggested by the photograph, allowing them to count against the gray of the roof and the ivy of the tower. This latter scheme is that which has been adopted in the sketch. It will be noticed that the trees are not nearly so dark as in the photograph. If they were, they would be overpowering in so large an area of white. It was thought better, also, to change the direction of the light, so that the dark ivy, instead of acting contradictorily to the effect, might lend character to the shaded side. 

"The lower portion of the nearer tower was toned in, partly to qualify the vertical line of the tower, which would have been unpleasant if the shading were uniform, and partly to carry the gray around to the entrance. It was thought advisable, also, to cut from the foreground, raising the upper limit of the picture correspondingly." 

A few observations:

• The drawings use short strokes and open, airy darks, rather than long lines and black areas. 

• A lot of his thinking has to do with the organization of tone. 

Other pen-and-ink artists who used a similar impressionist approach are Daniel Vierge, Joseph Pennell, and Ernest Peixotto.

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Books: 

Pen Drawing, an Illustrated Treatise

Pen Drawing and Pen Draughtsmen

The new app: Living Sketchbook, Vol. 1: Boyhood Home takes you deep into moments like this. It's available for iOS on Apple phones and tablets at the App Store and for Android devices at Google Play.

 

"When I found out about his app, I thought to myself: “Why didn’t I think of that?” It embraces technology and allows users an opportunity to get closer to an artist’s sketchbook. There are buttons that brings out the voice narrations with occasional videos of how he has painted on-site. Imagine a talking sketchbook with videos.”

—Erwin Lian, The Perfect Sketchbook

Drawing Animals: Advice from 1907

"The only materials needed for sketching from live animals in the field are two pencils, one soft and blunt, and one fairly hard and well sharpened; a sketch-book, preferably of the loose leaf kind, of small size; and a soft eraser."



So begins a 1907 article on animal drawing in the children's magazine St. Nicholas Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls.

The authors admit that a highly finished drawing of a live animal is very difficult to achieve in the field. Instead they recommend making a series of quick sketches that concentrate on the main outlines of the pose.



After drawing the main outline, the observer should make notes about key markings or coloration.

If you get nothing else, "first get the slant of the figure and the angles formed by the head and neck, legs, wings and tail, and then, if the bird is still before you, proceed with the smaller details."

Don't waste time on details that you could get from a mounted specimen.

The authors recommend that when the young artist returns home, he or she should fill scrapbooks of assorted outline sketches by cutting out the best examples of each species and putting them together with other similar poses.

Later, when you want to produce a finished picture, you can choose from the quick silhouettes and develop them into a more complete painting or drawing.
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St. Nicholas: A Children's Magazine

Zograscope

A zograscope is an optical device designed to disrupt depth cues when looking at a flat picture and create the feeling that you're looking at a real scene.

It consists of a large lens held vertically in a frame, and attached to an angled mirror. The viewer looks through the lens at the mirror reflection of a picture laid out horizontally on a table.

The device interferes with stereoscopic cues, and it collimates the light, resulting in an impression that you're looking at a real scene.


Special perspective prints were manufactured to work optimally in these devices.

Other zograscopes were portable units made to look like a fake book when folded up.


Optical instruments like this were popular in the 18th century as a form of parlor entertainment.

I've seen similar devices, such as cabinet stereoscopes and peep boxes. One I saw recently had dual eyepieces with anamorphic images mounted on the inside of the box, which adds even more to the impression of virtual reality.
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Resources
• You can make your own zograscope with an inexpensive Fresnel lens (less than $10) mounted in a cardboard box.

• Book: A Companion to Early Cinema

• Read more online about zograscopes and perspective prints

• Wikipedia on Zograscope

Liljefors: Pine Marten and Grouse

Bruno Liljefors (Swedish, 1860-1939) painted this dramatic scene of a pine marten jumping up to capture a black grouse hen. The marten appears at the top of its leap, its rear feet upraised and its tail in a blur.

Liljefors, Pine marten and black grouse hen,
watercolor and gouache, 1888, 34.5 x 48 cm, source

The drybrush handling of watercolor and gouache gives the forest textures a nervous energy. Liljefors frequently painted scenes like this outdoors, with dead specimens rigged into position with strings and wires. 

Liljefors, capercallie

He also observed and sketched living animals first-hand, both in the wild and in captivity. For a while he kept his own menagerie, but he was aware that the animals looked and behave differently in cages than they do in the wild.

Some detractors in his day complained that his work looked unfinished because he didn't paint every leaf or hair. 

Portrait of Liljefors by Zorn

"Truly, you cannot count the feathers on that duck's wing. But, let me ask, do you ever see the leaves as you search for some living creature in the mysterious depths of forest foliage? You'd have to look too sharp for that. And if you do see the creature, does it occur to you to count the feathers in its wings, even if it stays  long enough for you to detect its species?" 

The best book in English is: Bruno Liljefors: The Peerless Eye

Previously on GJ: Bruno Liljefors and the Fox

Wikipedia on Liljefors

World's Blackest Black

Even the blackest pigment reflects back a lot of light.

But now scientists have developed Vantablack, a high-tech surface comprised of a forest nanotubes. It absorbs nearly 100% of the light that reaches it. (Link to video on YouTube)

Eye tracking a pianist

(Link to YouTube) Expert pianist Daniel Beliavsky and his student Charlotte Bennett analyze eye-tracking footage taken while they perform, both from memory and from sheet music.

The more experienced pianist knows where the keys are and where his hands are, but he's thinking and looking ahead of the notes he's playing, and his gaze position is generally more stable.

I'd love to see what this technology, called Tobii Pro Spectrum, could tell us about how a visual artist sees the world.

As wonderful as it is, however, the limitation of such an eye-scanning device is that it can only track the center of the gaze. It can't account for peripheral vision. Without much changing gaze direction, experienced artists are able to widen their peripheral attention to see overall relationships or to focus the attention on small details.

Learning when and how to do that is one of the things art students must master.
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Previous posts on eye tracking
Via BoingBoing

Sometimes a still life won't hold still.

Here's an interesting subject for a quick gouache study: a frosted cake sitting on the counter at the diner.

It's got it all: chrome, a clear plastic cover, a paper doily, and white frosting. There's a warm underpainting in casein that I can leave mostly intact to represent the linoleum counter.


The only thing is, this is a hard working diner and things are going to move around. I'm just hoping that no one orders a piece of that cake. (Link to video on Facebook).

Previously: Banana Pudding Cake, Donut Jar

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The new app: Living Sketchbook, Vol. 1: Boyhood Home takes you deep into moments like this. It's available for iOS on Apple phones and tablets at the App Store and for Android devices at Google Play.

"When I found out about his app, I thought to myself: “Why didn’t I think of that?” It embraces technology and allows users an opportunity to get closer to an artist’s sketchbook. There are buttons that brings out the voice narrations with occasional videos of how he has painted on-site. Imagine a talking sketchbook with videos.”
—Erwin Lian, The Perfect Sketchbook

Character Design: Drawing vs. Acting

A single drawing of a character in a standing pose isn't really a character design.

Bob Clampett's model sheet for Daffy Duck

That's why good model sheets have so many extreme poses and expressions. And that's why animators make the best character designers.

A character design is more about acting performance than it is about static design. Warner Bros. director Chuck Jones put it this way:

"When you have a drawing, you don't have a character. It's like seeing a photograph of an actor, and then saying, 'We're choosing this actor.' I don't understand these casting directors: what do you know when you look at him? OK, he looks the part, but until I see him move, I haven't any idea whether he is the part or not. If it's anything, it's the bodily style, bodily movement, gestures, mistakes that you make, that identify you."

"The same is true in an animated character: 'This is the first Bugs Bunny' has no meaning. It's how Bugs came to stand and move and act, and what his feelings were, and his thoughts, and what kind of personality he was."

From Chuck Jones: Conversations by Maureen Furniss.