Tips for Painting Lamplight

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Tips for Painting Lamplight
// Gurney Journey

Jeff asks: "Any tips for conveying the effects of candlelight or lantern light in a painting?"

Jeff, yes, let's take a look at Viggo Johansen (1851-1935). He was a Danish painter in the Skagen group, and like his colleague Krøyer he loved to paint gatherings of friends around the dinner table. His painting Evening Talk includes a lantern on the table and two candles on the piano.

Viggo Johansen, Evening Talk, 1886

Johansen does a few things to make the effect of light convincing. 
1. The areas of dark are large and simple. Note how in the lower part of the picture, it's very hard to make out the details of the chairs and table legs.
2. The edges between forms in the outer areas are kept soft. Note the way he paints the framed canvases on the wall. They're quite blurry and out-of-focus.
3. The fall-off rate of the light roughly follows the inverse square law.
4. The effect area under the lantern is small, crisp, and detailed: lots of dots and sparkles.
5. The area of the lantern itself is a flat, warm white, with more or less glow or halation around it depending on the amount of smoke in the air.

Viggo Johansen, An Artist's Gathering, 1903

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Wikipedia Viggo Johansen (1851-1935)
More in my book: Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (James Gurney Art)(Amazon), or Color and Light (Signed on my website)
Previously on the blog:
Fall-Off
Candlelight
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How to Paint Rocks -- Value and Shape for Minerals Done Right

https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-mediums/watercolor/how-to-paint-rocks/

Sketching Art Materials with Pen & Wash

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Sketching Art Materials with Pen & Wash
// will kemp art school

Morning class! This week I've been putting together a new 'Beginners Guide' for the Art School and wanted to add a few little material sketches. For all the sketches I used the following pens on 220 gsm smooth, heavyweight cartridge paper which can handle light watercolour washes. Materials – Pen & Wash Lamy Safari Fountain […]
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Modern Times: Camille Paglia & Jordan B Peterson

A little intellectual but very interesting. Especially paglia's experience of modern art. I don't agree with everything said here of course.

https://youtu.be/v-hIVnmUdXM

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-nate

John Baldesari

main-qimg-126ad8cf25dde5037da0521ba770b360 1,600×1,200 pixels


https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-126ad8cf25dde5037da0521ba770b360

Jordan Peterson on How Creative You Are

https://youtu.be/pKZYS3fFTc8

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-nate

Jordan Peterson: The worst thing a creative person can do

https://youtu.be/ubNbIGv8d98

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-nate

VEHICLE SKETCHING I with Jeremy (fixed audio)

https://youtu.be/AXn979hRyIs

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-nate

The Artist Who Draws Negative Images That Become Realistic When Inverted

https://theuijunkie.com/brian-lai-negative-images/

Make Your own Golden Mean Calipers

https://www.quantumbalancing.com/goldenmeantemplate.htm

Eye Candy for Today: Peter Lely trois crayon portrait

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Eye Candy for Today: Peter Lely trois crayon portrait
// lines and colors

Portrait of a Lady, Peter Lely

Black, red, and white chalk, on gray laid paper; roughly 9 1/2 x 8 inches (24 x 19 cm); in the collection of the Morgan Library and Museum, NY.

Peter Lely, known for his sumptuous and sometimes erotic portraits of royals, nobles and courtiers in the 17th century court of Charles 1, here gives us a sensitively realized portrait drawing in the "trois crayon" method.

This is a method of drawing with three chalks — black, red (sanguine) and white — on toned paper, often cream or buff, but in this case, gray. It's an approach particularly suited to figure and portrait drawing.

Though it's difficult to tell if the drawing has faded to any degree since it was done, Lely's use of white and red chalks are judicious. His application of white is just a hint of tone, subtly raising the value of areas of the face and neck and a few curls of hair.

You can tell he started the drawing of the face with the red chalk, which remains the only outline of the forehead, lower face and nose, though the eyes and brows have been reinforced with black.

I haven't been through the hundreds of portraits attributed to Lely and his very active workshop in enough detail to know if this was a preliminary for a finished painting, but Lely evidently thought enough of the drawing that he signed it.

 

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Is snacking learning?

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Is snacking learning?
// Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect

Why does a class last an hour? Why does a TED talk last 18 minutes? Why does an MBA take two years?

Could it be that the default lesson length has something to do with the cost of switching rooms, which makes it inefficient to have really short lessons? Or the high cost of physical space, which makes it expensive to have really long ones... Perhaps length is a function of switching costs and bureaucracy structure...

One side effect of the low switching costs and high availability of choice on the web is that people are discovering things in 600-second bursts. 

What would happen if we started to do this on purpose? Learn a math lesson, understand a social history movement, learn something about human nature, five minutes have gone by...

Or what if we chose to dive in really deep, deeper than the real world would ordinarily tolerate. Five hours on a topic that might only get three minutes on a typical curriculum... or a month-long interactive seminar designed to teach something that's almost never taught.

I don't think learning is defined by a building or a certificate. It's defined by a posture, a mindset and actions taken.

It's still early days in figuring out the best way to transfer knowledge. The length of a class ought not to be set in stone. (For the very same reason that meetings at work should never last an hour).

       

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FZD Term 1 - Fundamentals

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FZD Term 1 - Fundamentals
// Feng Zhu Design

I'll continue sharing the courses we teach at FZD School of Design.

Besides Design Sketching, Term 1 also covers Perspective and Visual Communications 1.

All objects, whether soft surface (creatures, humans, etc.), or hard surface (vehicles, buildings, props, etc.), exist in 3D space. Thus, students must first understand how to "think" and "see" in 3D. By knowing how to calculate forms in perspective, students are able to design almost any subject matter. All possibilities are opened up once they understand how to use fundamentals. Students are no longer limited by themes or familiarity. They can tackle new subject matters and pickup design languages quickly.

Our perspective course cover the overall concept. Students are also introduced to 3D software during this term (more on this later).

Vis Comm 1 cover the concept of "draw through." This is a drawing technique in which objects are plotted out in 3D space. Basically, you draw what is actually there, verses just drawing what you see. This is a very time consuming process to learn, but it is one of the most important tools in my opinion. All objects are drawn in 3/4 product view.

So why not just use 3D software directly? Why even bother learning perspective when the tools can do it for you? The answer is simple. Photoshop and 3D software are just tools. They can't help you design. Tools are use to assist the designer, not the other way around. This is why we only introduce 3D software half way into a term.

For more examples, please visit : FZDSCHOOL.COM

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Words of Wisdom

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Words of Wisdom
// Deja View

...from Don Graham, Disney's prime art teacher during the Golden Age of animation. All of the animators valued his classes enormously. This is a magazine article from December of 1940.

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Neanderthals—not modern humans—made the oldest cave paintings

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Neanderthals—not modern humans—made the oldest cave paintings
// Gurney Journey

Some of the oldest cave paintings are in Spain, and they have been dated to 64,800 years ago, when the European subcontinent was inhabited exclusively by Neanderthals. This means that Neanderthals, and not just modern humans, were capable of the abstracted thought necessary for making meaningful marks. 

Those marks are reconstructed above. To the right is a complicated shape with branching forms. In the upper left, rows of small dots curve above a ladder-like shape. Are the dots counting or recording some number? Does the ladder-like shape suggest structures, boundaries, enclosures, or categories? No one knows. What those marks might mean is impossible to say. 

Animal outlines appear inside the rectangles, but it's possible they were painted after the the rest of the shapes. 

Read more at NatGeo: World's Oldest Cave Art Found—And Neanderthals Made It or at the Guardian: Neanderthals – not modern humans – were first artists on Earth, experts claim 

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