Origins

Real paint, real things and a strategy

I needed a break from working with computers so I decided to take up painting.

Well, that didn't quite work out quite as I expected. I ended up writing this!

I wanted to do real paintings with real paints.

I don't have anything against digital painting but there is nothing like a real painting. It has so much more romance. Our loved ones will surely swoon more if we present them with a gift of an oil painting than if we ping them an email with an attached .jpeg file.

The medium is the message. Marshall McLuhan

I was only interested in learning representational painting.

Good abstracts are too hard. Easy abstracts are too lame.

…and don't get me started on paint pouring. 😬

I soon found that creating a real representational painting requires a daunting host of skills.

It is nigh on impossible to acquire them all in one go. It is so discouraging to produce the inevitable unsatisfactory miserable excuses-for-paintings while still in the learning process.

Now I understand why, when old paintings are x-rayed, so many have other pictures underneath. Abandoned. Buried. Lost.

Minor rant about tutorials feel free to ignore

Looking for help, I watched a lot of painting tutorials on YouTube. Some good, some not. They seemed to be made by people who either trotted out rules without much insight:

Get the shadow colour by adding its complementary colour.

Er, yeah, right.

You mustn't use black.

Pretty much wrong.

To get a good, vivid octarine¹ you should always mix raw hooloovoo² with a little burnt amaklor-kalish³.

Meh. Everybody knows this already.

Some of these guys are trying too hard to look good and come across as an expert. They disguise their mistakes and hide the areas with which they struggle even though those would be the most interesting and useful bits.

Or worse, people with tremendous natural talent who just knew exactly what to do but who could not see that there was magic in there that needed to be explained:

What we want here is a nice warm green, *splat*slap*daub*, just like that.

What? Wait! What the flip is a warm green?

There are no rules. Paint whatever you want, however you want.

Err, how?

draw the rest of the owl

That's a bit: draw the rest of the owl.

I need a more explicative and more prescriptive process. At least at the start.

TIL. this draw the rest of the owl phenomenon even has its own subreddit

Don't look at it now. Save it for later. I need you to focus here.

I will do my best not to fall into these traps.

Apologies if it means I end up writing walls of text. So it goes.

[1] octarine

a fluorescent greenish-yellow purple from the Discworld books

[2] hooloovoo

a hyper-intelligent shade of the colour of blue from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[3] amaklor-kalish

an ultra-violet that can be seen by Klingons in Star Trek.

So, I decided to cheat. I would automate as many of the requirements as possible. I could then pick from them and focus on a single skill, one at a time.

If I had tried to learn everything at once I would have probably just crawled into a corner and given up.

Learning to juggle and ride a unicycle at the same time is much harder than

learning to juggle,
and then learning to ride a unicycle,
and then learning to juggle whilst riding a unicycle.

This also meant that my initial attempts at painting produced decent outcomes which encouraged me to keep moving forward.

It allowed me to learn how to paint without fear.

I needed to come up with a learning strategy because that is the kind of geek I am.

The first key to good drawing and painting is good observation.

We cannot depict a golden retriever if we have never seen one before another minor rant, please ignore me

Even if we have seen lots of them can we really remember their proportions and colours well enough? Do we know what separates them from other dogs?

Then it is difficult to come up with specifics to give what we are depicting some character.

Even when we have an individual in mind and we know her well but we are not currently looking at her, do we really know her distinctive characteristics by heart?

Or are we just going to draw a generic golden retriever? Or even just a generic dog?

Even if we can remember her proportions, colours and characteristics, can we envisage how she would look mid leap? The enthusiasm in her eyes? Can we envisage her lit by a low early morning sun?

No. No we can't.

If you can envisage her and can depict her in all her exuberant, shiny goldenness then this site probably isn't for you.

Thanks for stopping by though.

Does it matter?

I keep seeing posts from people boasting about not using a reference. That seems a little foolish. I guess it's ok if you have a photographic memory but otherwise they see to turn out rather generic. If you have got a photographic memory then it could be argued you are using a reference.

There is a big difference between drawing a drawing of a dog and drawing Buttercup.

So that lead me to the first part of the strategy:

*** Always paint from some sort of reference. ***

But physical references are not always available. There are not many tigers near here. And they move. She's not going to sit for weeks while I figure out how to make a painting. Even when just doing landscapes the lighting keep changing and the snow melts.

So, key number 2:

*** Paint from digital reference images. ***

This immediately helps to solve many difficulties in one go.

Representational painting becomes put the right colours in the right places. A photograph can tell us both what and where.

Artists known to use reference photos include: Paul Degas, Vincent Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, David Hockney …

Ok, but why digital reference images?

It is good to have a reference image to study but it is difficult to pull useful information from it. Digital images contain all the information we need in a format that can be easily interrogated.

So much for my taking a break from computers.