Why It's Critical to Step Back and/or Squint

Here's a great demonstration of why it's so important to step back from your painting:

http://blog.jonathanlinton.com/2010/09/step-away-from-painting.html

Class Notes - August 18, 2010

A bit backlogged getting these typed up...

• Oiling Out
• Why
• Restores value of darker colors, which often lighten when they dry and turn matte.  Essentially, you need to make the colors wet again.
• When
• Whenever the value has shifted enough to throw off your judgment
• Where
• Preferably only in the areas you plan on painting in that day's session.  Straight oil with no pigment in it can do strange things to paint applied over it.
• How
• Take a small bit of oil on a brush and work it onto the desired areas
• Try to keep it as thin as possible
• If possible, wipe as much oil as possible off with a paper towel or rag.  The idea is to have as little oil as possible on the surface to re-establish the colors.
• Painting into a couch
• Painting into a couch refers to putting oil or medium onto the canvas to create a different surface in which to work.  It's related to oiling out, but they aren't exactly the same thing.  Oiling out is done to re-establish values, while painting into a couch is done to change the working surface of the canvas so the paint goes on differently.  So, when oiling out, you are also creating a couch to paint into.
• Choosing/Editing Reflections
• Sometimes it's necessary to modify a reflection or leave it out altogether in order to enhance the form.
• The envelope
• The envelope is an optical drawing technique where the major points on the contour of the subject are connected with straight or nearly-straight lines.  Then, the points are cross-referenced and triangulated until they are more accurate.  Then the drawing can be further divided and refined.
• Ellipses and Cylinders

Better Sphere Rotation

Sphere Rotation

On Gesture...

Say you have Superman punching the lights out of some supervillain. Now, put Mickey Mouse in the same pose, so he's doing the same thing as Superman. You can't just stick his arm out- he needs to be punching the lights out of the supervillain. You can do this, even though Mickey's proportions are very different from Superman's.

That's gesture.

Class Notes - July 28, 2010

• 2D/Optical Drawing
• Envelope
• Practice judging width to height, particularly for objects in perspective
• How to measure this with a pencil
• 3D/Constructive Drawing
• Basic Box Construction
• Basic 2-point perspective setup
• Sides that are further away are smaller
• Ellipses in perspective
• Light & Shadow
• Progression of values on form - Modeling Factors
• Light
• Halftone
• Shadow
• Secondary (Reflected) Light
• Looking for shadow shapes
• Get these in first when possible

Class Notes - July 14, 2010

• 2 general approaches to drawing:
• 2D - drawing the shapes that things create.  Comparisons are made in two dimensions: plumb lines, angles, distances in picture plane, shapes (not volumes).  Requires you to be fairly meticulous and precise.
• 3D - drawing the volumes that things are made up of.  Requires a lot of knowledge of perspective.
• Best to understand and use both approaches
• Fixing a drawing
• There are always at least two solutions to a perceived problem:
• If a vase, for example, looks too tall, it could either be too tall or too skinny
• Instead of immediately looking at the area of the problem itself, a good first step is to look for information elsewhere in the picture to determine which solution is best 
• For example, if we immediately decide our vase is too tall and make it shorter, we might miss the fact that if we view it in comparison to the other objects, we might realize that the height is right, and in fact the vase is too skinny.
• Negative space
• Shapes around an object also dictate its shape.

• In this classic illusion, the white vase is the negative space for the two black faces, and vice versa.
• From the 2D/optical approach, drawing can be looked at as solving a puzzle of negative shapes and positive shapes