In many locations we have the neutrals of winter where the landscapes hold very little color, but we can train ourselves to see subtle hues in every neutral we see.  

Look at this bare tree trunk and its surroundings. What do you see? Gray, black, brown? 

Let's try this again, but this time don't allow yourself to call the colors gray, brown or black.  Look for hues.

Tip:  Labeling neutrals gray, brown or black blocks your perception to the hues your eyes are actually seeing.

Tip:  If you close one eye and squint the other so that all the details go away, then stare at the subject through your squint for at least ten seconds, colors will begin to reveal themselves.

What colors are you beginning to see? Purples, oranges, blues? Hold that squint a bit longer and allow the colors to settle in.  Narrow your attention to one small area and hold it there until a hue emerges.  Don't predict what it will be.  Let it tell you the hue you are seeing.

In the next photo, I have places splotches of a bit more saturated versions of some of the colors I see in the photo.  Underneath are the four major colors which would make a good limited palette to use for painting this subject. 

  

Happy painting,

Dianne

P.S.  As a limited palette, we can use mixtures from the saturated version of colors we discover to make interpretations of landscape neutrals. I used the limited palette above to do this little painting.

P.P.S. Why not use the Facebook forum to share small thumbnails and studies in which you're working out these weekly tips. 

The word shadow has been given an ominous meaning in many cultures.  Kids can be frightened by imaginary beasties lurking in the shadows and dogs will sometimes bark at theirs.  For the artist, though, shadows can become a place where the real intrigue in a painting lives.

      Look at this:

      

In the photo on the left, I see a subject of intrigue, but it is all in shadow. How does an artist interpret this?   

If you squint at the original photo, you will see a frontal pattern containing one large dark shape where the subject lives.  Behind it are groups of middle and light value shapes in a sunlit area.  These background shapes also include shadows, but being interspersed with light, they become part of an overall area bathed in sunlight.  We can see this distinction clearly in the simplification on the right.

 (Tip) When considering a subject in shadow, doing a simplification like this can help you see discover the overall relationship of values.

To help you to further analyze this, I have done an overlay of the photo and sampled from it spots of color in the diagram below.

Within the area of the iris and its surrounding foliage, notice that the lightest values are in the 6-to-5 range on a value finder.  Compare these with the darkest value samples in the sunlit portions. 

 (Tip) The darkest value in a sunlit area is in the same value range as the lightest value in a shadowed area. This principle holds relatively true across the board, no matter what subject you are painting.

Happy painting,

Dianne

P.S.  The left brain can trick us into thinking that the lighter portions in a shadowed area are lighter and more saturated with color than they actually are.  

P.P.S. Why not use the Facebook forum to share small thumbnails and studies in which you're working out these weekly tips.  I would like to see how some of you would do a simplification one of your photos where the intrigue is in deep shadow.

Eye guides are strategically placed spots of interest that create visual paths. There are many and they can be used in an array of creative ways.  Often they act as elements of intrigue.  

Try this.  

The content here is the dark circle.  The contrast of dark against light attracts the eye to the circle causing it to guide the eye.  The repetition causes visual movement and the arrangement creates the visual path.  In this exercise, you have used the same content and the same eye guide to create three different visual paths:  a horizontal, a triangle and a circle.

In my painting of an old river stump, the subject matter is the stump, but the content is more:  it's about how the late afternoon light is dancing around the stump, creating a circular visual path.  That visual path is made by repetitions of light that lead the eye around the stump, keeping the interest within the painting.

No matter how beautifully you paint a subject, without a visual path of some kind, the viewer's eye is likely to get stuck and quickly lose interest in the painting.

Happy painting,

Dianne

P.S.  Almost any kind of repetition can create a visual path as long as the eye guides are in contrast.

P.P.S.  Do you have a painting in which you have used repetition to create a visual path?  If so, why not share it with us on our Facebook forum.

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Painting a subject verbatim might not guarantee the best balance.  Even though an artist is technically masterful, if the images are not dynamically balanced, the painting will be weak.  On the other hand, a well-balanced piece can withstand awkward technique.

Dynamic balance means that everything in the painting is positioned so that the visual weight is equalized and viewer's eye keeps moving within the whole painting.

Like many of his contemporaries, 20th century Lithuanian-born American artist Ben Shahn lacked the adroit technical prowess of today's plein air painters, but his attention to dynamic balance gave strength to the subjects he chose to paint.

His paintings were never verbatim.  If they had been this might be the results of his Portrait of Myself When Young.

     

Yes, the space is balanced, but the eye circulates around the musicians. The empty space on either side of them causes a stasis.  There is nothing to keep the eye moving throughout the painting.

Adding Shahn's fourth musician on the left helps us see this image's function. It pulls the eye to the left and stops it.  Being turned in the direction of the other musicians, he redirects the eye back towards them.  This adds gesture and passage, giving a more active balance.

But watch how the dynamics change with Shahn's adding the distant figure on the right.

Happy painting, 

Dianne

P.S.  Painting verbatim means the subject is painted exactly as the artist finds it without further composing, not always a good idea.  Taking time to notice all a subject's elements can give us ideas for how these can be shifted to achieve a strong painting rather than just a well painted picture.

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During the act of composing, we're constantly using a combination of visual pulls (levers) and visual stops in order to keep the viewer's eye moving within the painting to keep it in balance or equipoise.  

    Try this:  

Sometimes we need simply to stop the eye and at other times we both halt it  and redirect it back into the painting.  

 Look at the two examples above from one of my little oil paintings.  In the image on the left, the eye moves diagonally downward from the top of the frontal cow's rear towards the second cow's head.  There's no other place for the eye to go except off the edge of the painting.

In the photo on the right we see that by adding the third cow to the back and left, the eye stops and because that cow is looking towards the viewer, we are redirected back into the painting.

By inserting a live being looking at the viewer or looking towards other images in the painting, we can both stop the eye and redirect it.

Happy painting, 

Dianne

P.S. Another way to stop and redirect is to insert the appearance of a moving object, such as a car or person walking, headed  towards the viewer or towards other images in the painting.   Try any of these methods in a small study and share your results with us on our Facebook page.

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        Feel free to contact me at dianne.mize@gmail.com          

Visual levers operate by a law of attraction that acts like gravity.  They are our tools for achieving balance or equipoise in our art work.

Try this:  

Two things are happening here:  the visual levers of isolation and of contrastare at work.  The eye will gravitate towards anything in isolation and anything that is in contrast.  Both black dots are in isolation, but the greater contrast of the one located in white causes the greater gravitational pull.  The stronger the contrast, the more the gravitation pull or attraction to the eye.

In the image on the left, they are balanced by a third isolated bird,contrasting in color instensity and looking in the direction of the other two.  All three actions add enough weight to give equipoise to the painting. By having the third bird looking in the direction of the other two, the eye is guided around the entire painting.

Try using these three visual levers in a painting and send to our Facebook group forum explained below.  It would be fun and interesting to see what kinds of solutions you can come up with. 

Happy painting, 

Dianne

P.S. Isolation means to be set apart or to be alone by location or by being different.   

ANNOUNCEMENT:  A number of you have indicated you'd like a discussion forum, so I have set up for us a closed Facebook Group HERE.  I won't be adding any names to it myself, so if you want to join the forum, go to the page and click on Join Group.  Membership in the group is entirely optional.  You will continue to receive the weekly Tips by email whether or not you participate in the forum.  

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Every image, every mark we make has a visual pull.  Try this. 

Even if you try to focus on the dot on the outside, your eye keeps being pulled towards the one on the inside.

Look at what is happening. The isolation of the first dot along with its contrast to the white paper caused a visual pull that attracts your eye to it. The second dot, also in isolation and equally contrasting, creates an equal pull, making it difficult for your eye to choose one over the other.  The letter C creates a directional force by the nature of its curve, causing your eye to favor the dot it curves towards.

That pulling force is a visual lever, a tool we use for balancing our paintings and drawings.  Wherever an image is placed, we use various visual levers or points of tension to distract away from it in order to give the overall  composition equipoise, counter-balancing or off-setting in order to create visual poise. 

In the painting above, I have used several visual levers:  see if you can find them all, then go here for the answer. 

Poised to get you thinking, 

Dianne

P.S. One definition of poise is freedom from affectation, but it also means ready for action.  Within both these and several other nuances of its meaning, there is always harmony and equilibrium.  

P.P.S.  Visual levers operate by a law of attraction that acts like gravity. More about this next week.

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The most confusing part of an emerging artist's learning process is the collection of rules we are told we must follow to prevent our paintings from falling into trouble.  Utmost among these is to avoid centering the main subject or its twin sister, to avoid dividing the painting in half.  

First, it is important to take a deep breath and realize that these ideas are simply rules-of-thumb.  Merriam-Webster's first definition of "rule of thumb" is "a method of procedure based on experience and common sense".  The second definition is " a general principle regarded as roughly correct but not intended to be scientifically accurate."  So there you have it:  out of many artists' experience, it has been found that centering a main subject or dividing a painting in half can be troublesome.  But this general principle might not always apply.

Here's an example of when it didn't apply:  one of the most famous paintings in our history of art, Leonardo's Last Supper, locates the main subject in the center therefore dividing the painting in half.  But he ingeniously uses the main subject as a fulcrum and uses the secondary subjects as mechanisms of balance by mirroring their groupings on either side of the main subject.  He uses the architecture behind them all and distant view behind the main subject to guide the eye back to the central subject as well as add depth and interest.  What Leonardo understood was that a subject can indeed be placed in the center of the painting and made to work by symmetrically balancing around it.

Balance is a universal condition directly connected the distribution of the weight.  We lose our balance when weight becomes unequally distributed.  So if our main subject, say a portrait, occupies half the space and the other half remains empty, the half occupied makes us feel like we're going to fall, throwing us off balance.  But something as simple as filling that empty space with dark color can add enough weight to balance the painting; however, if that dark won't enhance the painting, then occupying more space with the subject might do the job.  The subject, then, should feel as if it's reaching into the blank space enough to restore a sense of balance. 

Enjoy looking for balance everywhere.

Dianne

P.S. Balance is one of the forces of nature that maintains stability.  Within ourselves, in our art work, and in the universe itself, balance is one of the principles that sustains life.

Color has three components:  hue, value and intensity.  We have explored how to sight-read hue and value.  Now, we're ready to round this out and sight-read the full range of every color we see.  Let's look at intensity.

This  part of color also is called chroma and sometimes, saturation.  I prefer the calling it intensity because chroma feels a bit too technical for that one aspect of color that determines its vibrancy.   Perhaps the word saturation would be even better, but we'll use it to describe the degree of intensity.

Continuing to parallel color with music, when sight-reading music, we might see an indicator ppp for very soft or ff for very loud. When reading color, the intensity controls the softness or loudness of the color.  If the color is very bright, it's hue is at its highest saturation, therefore loud, but if it is more neutral, the hue is at a lower saturation, therefore softer.  

Last week we looked at a bluish green for value and hue.  This week we will see that it's intensity is low or soft because it contains very little hue.  Intensity then is the amount of hue contained in the color.  So to label the color accurately we'd call it low-intensity/middle value/bluish green.

 If a color is fully saturated with hue, its intensity is high; if somewhat saturated, its intensity is medium; if very little hue is present, its intensity is low.  It is important to note, though, that a hue's change in intensity does not affect the color's value.

When a hue is fully saturated, it is like a glass full of water:  just as a glass becomes empty when all the water is gone, so hue goes away as it's intensity is neutralized.  When all the hue is neutralized, it becomes no-hue, therefore neutral or what we normally call gray.  This happens when an equally saturated amount of complementary hue is added to it.  

    

When the 12 major hues are arranged in equidistance around a circle, those directly opposite each other--neither having any of the other's hue within it--are complements.  In our example here, orangish-red is complement to bluish-green.  Here's how the mixing of them looks.

So, how do we sight-read intensity?   Unlike sight-reading hue and value, we don't need to isolate a section of the overall color.

Light and shadow also effect the intensity of the color.  Both soften the intensity.  That's why when mixing shadows for a color, you get a truer shadow color by adding a complement rather than adding black and when lightening a color with white, it's a good idea to add back some yellow or red.

To wrap up this three-part sight-reading tip, when you encounter a color, determine its intensity first, then isolate sections of it to determine the hues and values distributed throughout.  Try to avoid labeling any color gray. Instead, determine what low intensity hue you are seeing.

Enjoy all the colors you see today,

Dianne

P.S. When we label something, we narrow it down.  If we label it with a non-descriptive word, we block our perception of it.  Seeing color means perceiving all three of its components:  hue, value and intensity.

P.P.S.  I wish you all abundance of love, inner peace and joy during this season of celebration.  

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An important part of sight-reading for the musician is recognizing the rise and fall of notes:  the higher the notes appear on the score, the higher pitched their tones are.  To sight-read color, we first identify the hue, something we did last week. Next we pinpoint the value of that hue by naming its range, a kind of visual pitch. 

There is a parallel between music and visual art in what both call tones.  In visual art, we call these values as well as tones.  We can distinguish these more easily by arranging them on a scale.   There are several value scales used in visual art, but the one I prefer has ten values arranged so that the lightest value is value 1 and the lowest is value 10.

    

  

We speak of a color as being high key or in the light range, middle key or in the mid-value range, and low key or in the darker value range.  When sight-reading color, then, we need to identify into which value range the hue we see falls.

We can augment last week's exercise to include the value range once we have identified the hue, so here's how that would go: 

If you happened to be looking at a wall painted the color of the above square, in an area where the light is strong you might see high value, blue-green, but in a shadowed area, you might see low-value, blue-green.   As the color appears here, it is a mid-value, blue green.  

There's a third color component that more precisely will pin down the color, but we'll do that one next week. 

Do this exercise at least once every day, the more often the better.

Happy Sight-reading,

Dianne

P.S. By doing daily sight-reading exercises we train our brains to recognize color, making it surprisingly easy to mix any color we're seeing without going through a whole lot of trial and error.

P.P.S.  If something concerning composing paintings is bugging you, such as proportion, perspective, selecting and placing or anything at all, send me an email and I'll give it a go in a future letter.

   I invite you to forward this to anybody you think might enjoy it.

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