Last couple of evenings have been uncharacteristically warm for Victoria. Usually, even in the summer, the moist air from the ocean is just cool enough to make staying outside at dusk uncomfortable without a sweater or a warm jacket. This is one thing that we miss about Italy – enjoying the outdoors in the evenings.
The last few days were exceptional, though. The perfect weather also coincided with the peak of tulip blooming. So this weekend, we made the most of both – went to the Butchart Gardens and did some sketching/painting of the flowers while sitting on the lawn until the closing hours. As we were getting ready to leave, we found out that the gardens stayed open until late at night that day because of the arrival of a cruise ship. So we had a chance to stroll through nearly-empty gardens at sunset, which is a rare occasion in any season, but particularly this time of year, when so many people come there to see the tulips. The weather was so nice that we decided to flip the dinner and start it by eating ice cream at the outside cafe before heading home.
At the park.One of the nice things of being on sabbatical is that I can try new things and new ways of doing old things without the fear of missing out on productivity. My rationalization is that since I am operating in a new environment anyway, it makes sense to let go of the daily routines, on which I typically depend.
A new thing that I am experimenting with now, while leaving in Milan, is sketching. This is not an entirely new activity for me, because I have been drawing and painting various things on and off for the past few years and I studied art during my school years.
This time, I am doing it in a more deliberate way. To be more precise, what I am doing is purposeful practice, in Anders Ericsson’s sense of the term. Deliberate practice would have included feedback from a teacher, whom I don’t have. Specifically, I am working on sharpening my observational skills, both in terms of the speed of capturing the salient features of the subject and in terms of the depth of observation.
Not to compare myself to Leonardo da Vinci, but Milan once was his stomping ground. He even put “draw Milan” in his now-famous to-do list. Also, Leonardo was arguably the most keen observer, who has ever lived. So I thought it would be a shame not to use the opportunity to follow in his footsteps.
First, I started sketching by using my photographs as references. My goal was to focus on a particular aspect of the photo and to capture the mood of the scene. I’ve done this type of drawing before, both digitally and using physical media, so I my goal was just to get into the habit of drawing regularly.
At the park.Last Sunday, I tried something different. I took my sketchbook to the park, where my daughter went to play on a sunny afternoon. At the park, I sat on the bench and sketched the parents, who were watching their children, talking on their phones, chatting to each other, etc. I wanted to capture the gestures, without focussing on the proportions, lighting, composition, etc. I found that it was quite easy to sketch people, who were just standing and sitting around, even though they periodically changed their poses. On the other hand, I had a hard time sketching people, who were walking by or cycling past me. There was just not enough time to capture the essential elements of their poses, before they were gone.
I think the speed of gathering the essential visual information is a trainable skill, though. My hypothesis is that the challenge is related to the limited capacity of our short-term memory. A visual image of a human figure, particularly in motion, contains a lot of information: proportions (e.g. width to height) of the body, relative angles of the shoulders, ribcage, pelvis, positions of the hands and feet, silhouette (including elements of clothing), lighting/shadows, etc. We can capture all of this information in one glance (probably, in less than two seconds), but cannot recall it when we need to reference it during actual drawing. On the other hand, the capacity of human long-term memory is nearly unlimited. In any case, it is certainly trainable. The limitation is that information cannot be committed to the long-term memory quickly. In my particular case of sketching passer-bys, my subjects were leaving the scene before I could memorize their poses.
Napoleon.So, my plan of improving the speed of observation is to follow a particular pattern when looking at the subjects:
1. Width-to-height ratio of the body.
2. Body angle.
3. Position of the limbs.
4. Silhouette.
5. Shadows.
Then, when sketching, I would follow the same pattern to recall this information.
Hopefully, with some training, I would be able to scan through the elements 1 – 5 more than once. This should enable me to account for the changing scene, lighting and poses. Actually, cycling through a pre-defined sequence of elements of the scene is an established attention-aid technique. It is used in teaching defensive driving by continuously going through a sequence of actions abbreviated as a mnemonic “SIPDE” – Scan, Identify, Predict, Decide and Execute.
This week, I have been working on a blog post for The Black Light Magazine to follow up on a recent photoshoot, where we had an opportunity to observe and compare the work of two makeup artists working side-by-side and using very distinct techniques. This is a replication of this blog post with some additional notes
Both of the artists applied full body makeup using fluorescent paints to female models, but one of them, Jenny, used airbrush and stencils, while the other one, Cory, applied a more conventional brushwork. Each painting technique had unique features, required different posing approaches from the models, and ultimately resulted in very distinct photographs.
The main difference between the two techniques, besides the fact that airbrushing has a distinct advantage of covering large areas quickly, is that spraying thin layers of paint creates an illusion of mixing the colours. The spray actually creates a pattern of small dots of colour, which the “mixed” optically. In other words, the viewer perceives them as mixed. This effect is similar to what Georges Seurat and other pointillists explored during the golden years of post-impressionism.
Cory did not mix the florescent paints, which would reduce brightness of the colours and could potentially affect the fluorescent properties (a feature that would be interesting to investigate experimentally some time in the future). Instead, he applied the paint in discrete, thick brushstrokes, which created a van Gogh-like effect. He made use of the patterns of brushstrokes, creating the sense of motion by making them meander along the model’s body. In fact, the model recognized this feature of finished painting and skillfully utilized it in her posing by exaggerating the undulations of the painted patterns in her dance-like moves (which, incidentally, had to be performed very slowly to accommodate the slow shutter speeds that we used).
Looking at the finished body paintings, the inherent imperfections of the hand-painted pattern gave it a unique, one-of-a-kind look. On the other hand, I am intrigued by the possibilities of airbrushing, because it allows quick coverage of large areas and layering and optical mixing of otherwise immiscible pigments. In the case of body painting, the “mechanical” style of the airbrushed makeup creates an interesting contrast with the natural features of the model. In general, perhaps, a combination of stencilled and free-hand airbrush painting can give the artist the best of both worlds – the efficiency of the airbrush as the tool and the human touch of the painter who wields it.
I believe there two mutually-exclusive strategies for stimulating viewer’s interest in a photograph.
The first approach is to include many details that the viewer can examine. An example would be a panoramic landscape or a cityscape with great depth of field, where the field of view spans a large distance and every detail is in focus. This image would literally deliver a lot of information and thus would hold the audience’s attention for a long time.
The second approach is a minimalistic one: to include only a minimum of information that is necessary to convey the impression of the subject (a place, a person, etc.) and to leave it up to the viewer to fill in the details. This principle is extensively used in Oriental art, for example, which heavily relies on the concept of negative space.
To me personally, the former approach is akin to brute force (it is almost always possible to overload the viewer with details), while the latter one is more elegant and subtle. When viewing a minimalistic image, the viewer becomes a participant in the process of forming the mental impression of that image. In a way, they take a partial ownership of that impression, and it is known psychological phenomenon that we like what belongs to us more than an object of equal material value that we have no connection with.
Also, I think that people like images that leave out certain details because the uncertainty in the specifics of those details prolongs the viewers experience of interacting with the image. The mind needs time to explore the possibilities, to try different combinations of the missing details before settling on the “final” version of the impression from the image. On the other hand, when everything is spelled out for us explicitly, the element of wonder and discovery is lost, and while we might be receiving a lot of information, the experience is less personal.
For this year’s Christmas card, I used a portrait of our daughter as a background, on top of which I drew a winter motif in Photoshop. Initially, I looked for various card templates, but decided that it would be more personal (and more fun), to paint the picture by hand.
I sampled the colours from my daughter’s drawing in the photo and painted a snowy tree on a separate layer using various natural-looking brushes in my list of presets. I used a Wacom Intuos Pro Graphics Tablet, with the size and hardness of the brush linked to the pen pressure.
Then, on a separate layer, I drew the streaks made of snowflakes. To do this, I created a custom brush using a snowflake-shaped brush tip (I found a free set of simple snowflake-shaped brushes by doing a Google search) and adding the following dynamics:
Scattering:
“scatter” setting of approximately 150% with “both axes” box checked – to make each brush stroke consist of individually-visible snowflakes;
“count jitter” setting of about 75%.
Shape dynamics:
“size jitter” and “minimum diameter” settings of about 20%;
“angle jitter” of about 10% – so that the individual snowflakes would be slightly rotated within the single brushstroke.
When my daughter saw the final picture, she said that she drew it. In part she is right – I used elements of her doodles in the picture, which makes it special for me. I think about it as our first collaboration and hope that one day she would be up for drawing something together for real.
Both of the artists applied full body makeup using fluorescent paints to female models, but one of them, Jenny, used 
The second approach is a minimalistic one: to include only a minimum of information that is necessary to convey the impression of the subject (a place, a person, etc.) and to leave it up to the viewer to fill in the details. This principle is extensively used in Oriental art, for example, which heavily relies on the concept of negative space.
. Initially, I looked for 
, with the size and hardness of the brush linked to the pen pressure.