Talking models

In 1993, Andrew Wyeth invited Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Hoving to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania for a two-session portrait.


(Link to video.) It ended up being perhaps the only time Andrew Wyeth was filmed in the act of drawing. Wyeth insisted that Hoving talk during the entire posing session because, first, he wanted to hear Hoving’s stories, and second, because he wanted Hoving’s face to be animated: "I must have animation," Wyeth said.



John Singer Sargent also liked his subjects to talk while he painted them. Vernon Lee told her mother that she enjoyed sitting for Sargent very much: “John talking all the whole time and strumming the piano between times...He says I sit very well; the goodness of my sitting seems to consist in never staying quiet a single moment.” They were childhood friends and she was as much a whirlwind talker as he was.

via Muddy Colors
Book: John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes.

Gamut Masking Follow-up

Follow-up on gamut masking: Alex Castillo has made a digital Yurmby wheel and generously offered it to everyone to use. It has a finer set of increments, so it’s better for color picking. Thanks, Alex!



Grafite has translated some of the material into Italian.  Grazie.

And Charley Parker of the blog Lines and Colors did a post about it. If any art school teachers try using this in a classroom, please send me photos of what you do with it, and I'll do a post.


LINKS
Book:  Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
Previously: Gamut Masking Method

Seeing Through the Sky

In his book Modern Painters, John Ruskin speaks of looking not at a sky, but through it.

“It is not flat dead colour, but a deep, quivering, transparent body of penetrable air, in which you trace or imagine short falling spots of deceiving light, and dim shades, faint veiled vestiges of dark vapour.”

Painting: Thomas Hill (1829-1908), View of Yosemite Valley, 1871. Thanks, Armand.
Wikipedia on John Ruskin and Modern Painters

Foliage Article in International Artist

The new October/November issue of International Artist magazine has a masterclass article that I wrote on painting trees and foliage.


Foliage is a special challenge because it’s not like painting a plaster cast or a figure. It doesn’t follow the form principle, and it presents a whole different set of issues: texture, detail, translucency, and atmospherics, which follow laws not usually taught in art schools. I also cover the “green problem,” and how to deal with it.

This issue also has a presentation by Thomas Schaller about how to handle large variegated watercolor washes. 

In the “Art of Illustration” section, there’s a piece written by Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon about the “Making of Comic Art” and an article by Greg Ruth about drawing and graphic novels. International Artist has been one of the leaders among mainstream art magazines to take an interest in illustration, comics, and fantasy.


Thomas Schaller
Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon's "Teetering Bulb"
Greg Ruth's "Greg Things"
International Artist magazine
The topic of foliage and trees is also covered in Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
Previously:
The Form Principle

Why do veins appear blue?

I’d like to straighten out an incorrect statement that I made in a previous post and in my book on color.

On page 156, I said that in the region surrounding the lips, “there are relatively more veins carrying blue deoxygenated blood,” It turns out to be a misconception that blood turns blue when it loses its oxygen contact.

Yet veins deep below the skin certainly do appear blue. Why, then has no one seen blue blood? I had always assumed the answer was that if when a vein is cut open, the blood immediately turns red on contact with air.

In fact, blood is always red (or at least a deep maroon color) when it is deoxygenated.

What’s going on here? The scientific answer involves a lot of factors, but according to Wikipedia, on light Caucasion skin at least, “veins appear blue because the subcutaneous fat absorbs low-frequency light, permitting only the highly energetic blue wavelengths to penetrate through to the dark vein and reflect off. A recent study found the color of blood vessels is determined by the following factors: the scattering and absorption characteristics of skin at different wavelengths, the oxygenation state of blood, which affects its absorption properties, the diameter and the depth of the vessels, and the visual perception process.”

READ MORE
PDF of scientific paper
Wikipedia on Veins
Good summary by Quora.com
Science Blogs.com on the subject  
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
Previously on GJ: Three Color Zones of the Face

Photo from We Heart It.
Thanks, Myke!

Albert or Marilyn?

When this picture appears big, it looks like Albert Einstein.


If you back up from it or see it reduced, it looks like Marilyn Monroe.

This illustrates a phenomenon that portrait painters often notice. As you back up from a portrait, the eyes can seem to shift direction, the expression seems to change, or the whole likeness alters.

Here's more about the illusion from Mail Online:

"The work of Aude Oliva and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the illusion was created in three steps. First, the researchers obtained a photograph of Marilyn Monroe and removed the fine-grained facial features, such as any wrinkles or other blemishes.

Second, they obtained a photograph of Albert Einstein and removed the more coarse features, such as the shape of the mouth or nose.  Finally, the two images were superimposed on top of one another. Because the fine-grained features are visible close up, the image looks like Albert Einstein when you're just a few inches away from the page. However, move a few feet away and suddenly only the coarse features are visible, magically transforming the image into Marilyn Monroe."

More great illusions at the Mail Online
Thanks, Beaman Cole!

Part 3, Gamut Masking Method

Let’s see how the gamut masking (or "mapping") method actually works, using the example of that bright colored Las Vegas scene.


This video walks you through it, step by step.

(Video Link) By comparing the three paintings below, you can see how the two smaller paintings were shifted to the warm and cool.


Note that underneath each of the two shifted paintings is a set of nine swatches. Those are the subjective primaries carried through three values each. Each of the paintings was done with those carefully limited subjective primaries, leaving aside the tube colors. Note also that two of those primaries are the same: the green-cyan, and the red-magenta.

The wild card is the yellow in the top one and the blue in the bottom one.

Now look at those three swatches connected by arrows. The color note that appears as the blue sky in the warm scene is almost exactly the same color as the color that appears yellow in the cool painting. Both are basically a neutral gray. It’s a subjective secondary belonging to each of the two gamuts.

I’ve out lifted those swatches out of the smaller paintings so that you can see how they look out of context. I’ve also lifted a swatch of the “yellow” from the cool painting and put it over the yellow shoe in the original painting.

It’s hard to believe that a neutral gray could appear either blue or yellow.


These are weird mixtures, and you wouldn’t think of using them unless you forced yourself with the gamut masking system.


This is reminiscent of the colored cube illusion we’ve seen before, where the red and cyan squares look different, but they’re both really the same gray.

This little demo will be part of an article that I wrote, which will be appearing in the upcoming fall print issue of American Artist’s Plein Air Painting magazine.

Previously on GJ:
Gamut Masking, Part 1
Gamut Masking, Part 2

Gamut Masking, Part 3

 Colored Cube Illusion (aka "Color Constancy")
2008 post on color masking

A free online gamut masking tool for digitally minded artists by Richard Robinson

You can order the book "Color and Light" by mail from my online store and get it signed, or order from Amazon below.