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8/4/2021 5:03:42 PM

Color Temperature - The Final Frontier!

William A. Schneider / 2 Comments

Representational artists must learn four basic skill sets if they ever hope to successfully render a person or object: shape (drawing), value, edge treatment, and color temperature relationships. We generally learn them in that order. I remember struggling for years before I could finally see and depict the temperature relationships! Temperature is so challenging, in part, because we don’t normally talk or think about it…therefore we don’t have a verbal “bucket” to house that information.

When I ask students “What is the temperature of the light?” I’m often greeted by a blank stare. In fact, that should be the first question we ask ourselves. It’s crucial!

In rendering anything, the major division is between light and shadow. We all know that there is a value difference between the two. However, beginners don’t recognize what the pros know full well: there is also a temperature difference between light and shadow. For example, north light on a clear day is a cool light. What makes it cool? If we run that light through a prism, we find that it contains more blue rays than yellow-orange-red ones. If we block that light, we create a shadow that has less blue in it. Therefore, it must be warmer. Light generates a shadow of the opposite temperature. Cool light creates warmer shadows; warm light creates cooler shadows. (Generally! There are certain rare atmospheric lighting conditions where that may not hold true…but that’s a topic for a later blog.) Here’s an interesting factoid: the darkest recesses are virtually always hot…regardless of the temperature of the light.

Artists ignore temperature at their own peril. If we fail to depict the warm/cool shift between light and shadow, our paintings will look wrong. Viewers probably can’t verbalize why the paintings don’t look right but they certainly recognize that they don’t!

Light temperature is measured in degrees Kelvin. The higher the number, the cooler the light. (Imagine a block of steel heated to 3500 k. It will glow with a yellowish-orange light. If you heat it further to 5500 k, it glows with a blue light.)

In judging temperature, we face several problems:

1. Sometimes it is just plain hard to see the temperature of the light.

2. We tend to confuse local color with temperature. We think of certain hues as warm or cool. For example, is this pastel stick warm or cool?

How about now? It’s cooler than the orange stick.

How about now? It's much warmer than the blue stick!

The fact is that the temperature of a color is always in relation to another color; you can have a warm red or a cool red depending on what’s next to it.

3. Even if we see them, mixing colors that carry the relationships throughout the entire painting can be a challenge.

Here are some solutions:

1. Keep looking! (I.e., force yourself to think about temperature shifts) Eventually they will become obvious to you.

2. Hold something white (like a paper towel) in the light. Does it look more blueish or yellow orange?

3. If you can't judge the light, try looking at the shadows; do they seem warmer or cooler than the light areas?

4. Mix puddles – use a palette knife to mix large masses of paint for the light areas and for the shadows. Look at the puddles below. I mixed these for flesh in the light and shadow. Each puddle has areas that are redder or greener or more violet, but the overall temperature of the light puddle is cool (I mixed blue and white as the base for that puddle) - the opposite of the overall temperature of the shadow puddle. In addition to managing the temperature, mixing puddles does three other good things:

a. It helps us avoid unintended value jumps within an area (getting “spotty”)

b. It forces us to mix enough paint (most beginners use a fraction of the paint they should)

c. It keeps our palette, and our thinking organized!

5. Use two different brushes. One for light and one for shadow…don’t mix them up!

6. Force yourself to think “With this stroke, which am I painting - light or shadow?”

7. At first, exaggerate the temperature difference (it’s easier to grey down a saturated color than it is to “punch up” a greyed one).

Here’s a helpful exercise: look at some of your favorite paintings and ask yourself “Was this subject under warm or cool light when the artist painted it?

Here are some examples:

“My Wild Irish Rose” Pastel

Don’t be confused by her red hair and freckles. The model was under cool north light. The giveaway is the warmer shadows under her hair on the forehead and under her lower lip and chin. You can also see the cool highlights on her nose, forehead and chin.

“1001 Nights” Oil

The light source is clearly warm. Note the cooler shadows cast by the veil. You can even see the candle’s hot illumination “eating” into her fingers as the light pours between them.

“Dappled” Oil

This is a much more complex lighting situation. You can see the warm light sunspots on the model’s arm and the blanket. But in the open shade the light is cool. (The tree above blocks direct sunlight but there is plenty of illumination from the blue dome of the sky. Look at all the blue on her dress and the blanket). It’s also worth noting that the deepest darks next to her cheeks are hot!

I encourage students to actively work on seeing and depicting temperature shifts. That knowledge will make you become a more advanced artist!

3/25/2021 1:57:57 PM

More About Drawing

William A. Schneider / 2 Comments

In December’s newsletter I wrote that “drawing is the root skill.” The sad truth is that if my drawing is off, no one even looks to see how well I painted the eye, mouth, or any other detail. BTW what most people mean by “drawing” boils down to proportion – having the right parts in the right place.

At the American Academy of Art in Chicago, I had the great fortune to study life drawing with the legendary Bill Parks who trained many of today’s professional artists. He taught two drawing methods: contour and gesture.

Contour is a concise description of the subject. Mr. Parks often said that a line goes “a certain distance before it changes direction” – length and angle. He said that contour drawing is “like brain surgery.”

Gesture, on the other hand, is about movement and action. He used to describe it as a “scribble, but it’s a meaningful scribble. It has mass and direction and, most importantly, it’s doing something!”

Contour drawing involves careful measurement. We lay out the features by comparing two relationships at a time. The first measurement on a head was “distance from top of head to the inner corner of the eye (along the center line), compared to the distance from the corner of the eye to the bottom of the chin.” We make marks on our drawing paper to indicate the same proportions. The artist continues dividing the space to find ever-smaller relationships. It’s a systematic method for accurate drawing. The key is to measure…don’t guess! Mr. Parks also admonished us to “see how square you can make the round”. In other words, draw with straight lines, not curves. It makes the drawings more powerful and more accurate! Here are a couple of examples of contour drawings.

You can go to my YouTube channel to see these as time lapse videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW0r7A51_H0&t=12s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiz6Wd6DgP8 (Please “like” and subscribe.)

Bill Parks method for gesture drawing is to “start at the top of the pose and go straight to the bottom. Next find a center point and then work a little on one side and then the other. Always looking; always comparing.” I bet I heard those words a thousand times during the eight years I studied with him. As the artist’s gaze moves around the figure, the charcoal follows, scribbling the mass and action of the pose.

After laying out the gesture of the pose, we were taught to come back and put the contour drawing on top of it. Then, if we had time, we’d draw the contour of the edge of shadow pattern. We could shade the shadow pattern when the model took a break. Using this compound method one can capture a fairly accurate representation of a figure in a few minutes. This method yields a lively drawing that is anything but stiff! Here are a couple of examples of 5 minute drawings.

6/3/2019 10:15:58 PM

Life Long Learning

William A. Schneider / 4 Comments

Athletes lose strength, speed, and agility as they age... there are no 60-year-old pro-bowl quarterbacks. Artists, however, can (and should) keep learning and growing their entire lives! Leonardo da Vinci on his deathbed said, "I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have!" He was still intent on learning.

Chunking

Given that the quest for mastery is never-ending, it's probably a good idea to find the most efficient way to learn. Bryan Mark Taylor calls it chunking. The idea is to isolate and master one "chunk" of information at a time before moving on to the next.

For example, if you have trouble seeing and mixing color, immerse yourself in that for a while; don't worry about drawing or value or edges. You could read the color section in Richard Schmid's "Alla Prima," take a "Color Boot Camp" workshop (I periodically teach them and Camille Przewodek teaches several per year), try the Henry Hensche block exercise, and make color charts (mixtures of every color on your palette done in five values). In short- Work that chunk! Here's a color chart of the "Zorn Palette"- ivory black, permanent red medium, yellow ochre, and white.

It's all in our heads

This leads to another issue- the way we think about each painting. If we view each attempt as a potential "masterpiece," the painting becomes too precious... and we become too timid. Better to think of it as a study... a way to practice and improve our skill set.

Research

If you steal ideas from one person, it's plagiarism; if you take from many, it's research. I encourage students to try any approach or technique that seems in the least bit intriguing. The worst thing that can happen is you'll ruin a piece of paper or canvas. For example, I read an article about "dayturnes" - daytime pieces that were altered to make them look like they were done at night. Hollywood routinely shoots night sequences in broad daylight, then lowers the value, changes the overall color to blue-green, reduces the saturation, increases the contrast, and voila... you have a night scene! Here is my experiment with dayturne, "Midnight on the Bayou." Another arrow in the quiver! Never be afraid to try new things!

No Limits

Try subjects, media, or techniques that are out of your comfort zone. I often speak to artists who are only comfortable in one lane: They only do portraits, they only do landscapes, they only do pastels, they only do oils...you get the picture. I feel for these artists because so often, it's really a fear of the unknown that is holding us back. As Nietzsche said, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." When asked how to become a great portrait painter, John Singer Sargent replied (and I paraphrase), "First, become a great painter, then worry about portraits." The great masters painted everything: figures, landscapes, and still lifes...maybe that's why they became Masters.

Mileage

This brings us to my final point, The 10,000-hour rule. To master anything, it takes many hours of practice. So paint or draw the same way the Chicago machine votes- "Early and often!

5/27/2018 3:36:18 PM

The Perpetual Student

William A. Schneider / 2 Comments

The great thing about being an artist is that the journey never ends. But some artists seem to hit a plateau and stop improving.

There’s an old saying, “If you do what you always did, you get what you always got”. If we keep practicing the same errors, we remain stuck. We need a change of mindset…to view of ourselves as perpetual students. If most pieces are learning exercises rather than finished paintings we can experiment and continue to add new tools to our artistic toolkit. In a Zen sense we have no attachment. Musicians are very clear about separating practice from performance. They practice scales and arpeggios so that when they perform a solo they have the command of their instrument.

We need to identify what we need to work on. As my friend Dan Gerhartz says, “Attack your weakness”. It’s usually: drawing (shapes), value, color temperature relationships, or edges. For example, I was dissatisfied with the way I was rendering hands, so I bought The Book of a Hundred Hands by George Bridgeman and copied every illustration into my sketchbook. By the time I had finished I not only understood the anatomy but also was able to capture the more expressive gestures of the hand. Here’s a detail of one of my paintings.

Bryan Mark Taylor calls this “chunking”. That is, identify one particular skill and practice that “chunk” until it is mastered. If you’re working on value structure, don’t worry about drawing, design, color, and narrative. Believe it or not this is the fastest way to master of a new skill. Martial artists practice each block, strike, or kick in isolation, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. Finally they learn to chain them together into patterns or combinations (Katas). In a combat situation they don’t have to think of each movement, they rely on muscle memory.

Another good idea is to work in a series. That is, paint the same object or scene a number of times to try out different approaches. This works well if you ask yourself “what if “questions. “What if I painted it in a very low key? What if it was high key? What if it was all in shades of blue? What if I sprayed it with alcohol and let it run? What if I did it in 25 strokes?” Some of these experiments may be terrible, but some may send your work in a new and interesting direction.

A great idea is to copy masterworks. Sargent did; Zorn did. In fact virtually all the great artists have done this type of research. The goal is to figure out the master artists’ thought process. Why did they make the choices they did? We all want to be original, but the more we learn from other artists the more tools we have to express our own personality. Again, think of musicians. Eric Clapton copied Robert Johnson and B.B King and other blues greats to develop his own style. A great idea is to copy a masterwork in a different medium. Here’s a Fechin oil painting copied in pastel.

Finally, we need to work as much as possible from life. The camera lies to us…especially about value, color, and edges. Working from life and squinting at the subject to simplify value, and edge relationships will help us grow. (working from photos will hold us back.)

3/27/2017 5:32:46 PM

Beyond the Study

William A. Schneider / 3 Comments

In our journey as artists we spend a long time learning how to render. We focus on drawing, values, edges, and color and eventually learn how to paint a decent head, or vase or figure. However, we often paint the subject in isolation; the “background” is almost an after thought. In essence, we create a “study,” but many artists never make the leap to creating a finished, complete painting. Masters like Sargent and Sorolla painted hundreds of studies but as preparation for the masterworks we admire in the top art museums.

So what’s the distinction?

A study is concerned with likeness, and rendering. A painting is concerned with meaning, narrative, relationship, and emotion. In a study the subject is paramount, the background relatively trivial. In a painting the “background” is essential. It provides context and narrative. In the study the focus is on depicting a person or object. In the painting, the overall composition (distribution of light and dark shapes) is crucial. Every square inch of the painting is important.

How do we get from here to there?

In the 19th century advanced students at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris or the Repin Institute in Russia were expected to create large, complex, narrative paintings. They worked under the guidance and advice of their professors. Nowadays, such rigorous training is largely absent. (There are a few notable exceptions such as the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, the Florence Academy, and the increasing number of representational ateliers that have been founded over the past two decades.)

There are also a few workshops that focus on creating more finished paintings. (I’m teaching one in my studio in early May.)https://schneiderart.com/workshop/14657/beginning-to-end-making-a-large-studio-painting But many artists are left to make the leap on their own.

If you fall into the do-it-yourself camp, expect to spend a lot of time and effort learning this element of our craft. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to think! As the master illustrator Andrew Loomis wrote, “All creativity is in the planning. The rest is just good carpentry.”

We need to train ourselves to think like a filmmaker. As you plan ask yourself the crucial questions: who is the subject? What is happening? When? Where is the scene taking place? Why?

Once you start to formulate a concept, how will you depict it? There’s a dramatic way to portray any situation, it’s up to us to figure it out. Should the painting be in a high or low key? Will the setting “tell the tale” or will it be the model’s expression or body language? What accessories do you need? How should the models be dressed? Use sketches and “roughs” to work out the concept. (Hint the first idea is usually not the best idea.) When you’ve worked out a good idea then set it up, hire models and go for it…don’t try to make it up

I suspect that many artists are in such a hurry to get to the “fun” part that we skip the requisite planning. Here are some of the studies that Sargent used to prepare for his masterwork, “The Oyster Gatherers of Cancale.”

3/12/2017 10:33:02 PM

A New Pair of Glasses

William A. Schneider / 1 Comment

One of the challenges we face as artists has to do with the way the human brain works. We filter out the commonplace while focusing on the new or unusual. (Evolutionarily speaking -- Ignore the wind rustling the leaves; pay attention to the saber-tooth tiger coming through the meadow.)

This filtering means that any error we leave on our canvas for 10 or 15 minutes becomes invisible to us… until the next day! It’s not that the “evil painting trolls” come out at night and attack our paintings. It’s just that it takes a fresh eye to make the flaws obvious.

Here are some good painting practices that can help:

• Squint at your subject to simplify value and edge relationships…it helps to see the big picture.

• Step back frequently.

• Have a mental checklist. (How’s the alignment? Is the drawing OK? How about values? Are the temperature relationships correct? Do the edges range from razor sharp to completely lost?)

• Use a mirror to see your piece reversed (a great way to spot alignment problems).

• Use a black mirror above your eyes to see the image inverted.

• Take a photo on your smart phone. Sometimes just seeing a small version of the painting is all we need.

• Use a program like Value Viewer, to gain a new perspective.

One of the most helpful things I learned was to ask others to critique my work. If you can get input from a master artist, great! But a spouse, friend, or even a non-artist can tell you if something’s not working. It’s much easier to see problems in others’ work then in our own. Hint: Don’t get defensive! Thank them for the input and then decide for yourself if you need to act on the advice. Here are some "before" and after images in response to well-founded criticism.

Good instruction helps with all of the above. It can show us our blind spots, give us ways to correct the flaws, and teach us principles to organize our thinking (a road map.) Perhaps, most importantly, it can sensitize us to habitual errors. For example, I have a tendency to make the iris of the eye too large. This leads to enlarging the eye and then the space between seems too small. One small initial error causes the whole painting to rapidly spin out of control. Just knowing what to watch out for is invaluable!

2/29/2016 11:12:06 PM

The Color Study

William A. Schneider / 1 Comment

Master artists consistently give students the same advice: “paint from life!” But it’s easy to understand why beginners instead prefer to work from photos: they’re so convenient. You can paint in your comfortable studio. No bugs, wind, rain, or intrusive passers-by. No schlepping heavy equipment. The model doesn’t wiggle or fall asleep.

The problem is that photos lie to us. Think of the four elements of a representational painting: shape (drawing), value, color, and edges. Three of those four are always wrong in a photo: Values are the number one offender! (The two or three darkest values turn into black and the two lightest values go to white.) The colors are limited to the phosphors in our computer screens (or worse yet, the dyes used to make prints). All edges are equally sharp…not at all like the way we actually see.

Even the shapes or proportions are wrong some of the time. (Did you ever see a photo of yourself taken from too close a distance; the nose looks huge!) If we work predominantly from photos, we become quite skillful…at painting unrealistically.

One age-old solution is to make a color study. But beginning artists have trouble with this. Students usually try to make a finished painting …just faster. It doesn’t work.

The key is to try to capture accurate value, color, and edge relationships and don’t worry about the drawing. Here’s a suggested procedure:

Identify the temperature of the light itself. (Is it warm or cool?)
Identify the darkest dark and the lightest light. Put those color notes on the canvas.
Get the color in the shadow.
Paint the color of the highlights.
Try to get the color (and temperature) of plane changes on the form.

When you get back to your studio, use a de-saturated (black and white) photo for the drawing. Use the color study for everything else. Don’t be tempted to look at the colors in the photo reference; it will only confuse things.

Here are some color studies and the resulting paintings.

10/29/2015 4:22:41 PM

Copying Masterworks

William A. Schneider / 5 Comments

As we struggle to learn our craft we attend classes, take workshops, and read magazines or books. But there’s one invaluable practice that’s often overlooked: copying masterworks.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, after students had completed the rigorous course work at the Ecole des Beaux-arts or other European art schools, they were sent off to copy masterworks in the Louvre or the Prado. Sargent, Zorn, and Sorolla all trekked to Madrid to copy Velasquez (in fact Sargent carried his copies with him all his life). Most of today’s professional have also copied other artists.

Why make copies?

To understand the master’s thought process - All the decisions about composition, color, edge treatment, and technique have already been made; our task is simply to “reverse engineer” the process.
To cement our insights – I can read about an artist and study a particular work, but if I want to retain the information I have to paint or draw it. It’s almost as if the info travels through my brush, up my arm and into my brain.
To get inspired - It’s a rush to suddenly understand how an effect was created.

Some tips:

Don’t just copy spot for spot. Try to reason out the process. What did the artist do first? Second? Why?
Decide what you’re trying to learn from the piece and focus on that. For example, if you’re trying to understand Sorolla’s use of color temperature, don’t get hung up on the drawing.
Remember, the goal isn’t to make a forgery; it’s to understand the master’s thought process.

Some students say “I don’t want to copy masters because I want to develop my own style.” Don’t worry about it. Your style will come. Think of musicians; the great rock guitarists all learned by copying B.B King, Robert Johnson, Django Reinhardt etc. It’s how knowledge accumulates over the years.

Here are a couple of my recent copies: a Sargent watercolor and a Fechin portrait. With both of these my goal was not to make a perfect imitation but rather to understand as best I could the artist’s thoughts and procedure. I think I accomplished that in these short exercises.

I was astounded at how Sargent simplified the painting into (I think) three washes. The drawing is fairly complex, but manageable. I think he put down a first wash of raw sienna and when that was almost dry put in the overall shadow pattern with ultramarine blue and maybe a touch of violet. I think the final step was to put in all the details as dark accents.

With the Fechin piece I wanted to see if the broken edge effects could translate from oil into pastel.

By the way, here are the originals.

7/3/2014 11:54:36 AM

The well-fed palette

William Schneider / 3 Comments

Business consultants have amended an old saying. It’s now “perfect practice makes perfect.” In other words, build good habits; don’t just practice bad ones.

Virtually all professional artists use plenty of paint. Most amateurs don’t. I see it all the time. The student squeezes a fingernail’s worth onto his palette. The paint is rapidly used up, leaving just a stain. But the student still vainly tries to scrub some color into the tooth of the canvas with nothing on his brush. It just doesn’t work!

I tell my pupils the obvious: “you can’t paint without paint!” But old habits die hard. Why? Maybe it’s the “children are starving in Europe” theme that our moms used to coax us into eating our vegetables. [The proverbial European children may be starving but they’re not starving for paint!]

My guess is that in the beginning, we think that paint is too expensive. Paint is not very expensive compared to your time. But even if you don’t buy that argument, here are a few things you can do to build good paint habits:

When you’re done, scrape your unused paint onto Saran wrap and save it in the freezer for your next time.It'll keep for months.
Use student grade paint (not optimal, but better than a starved palette.)
Try the Zorn palette (Permanent Red Medium, Ivory Black, Yellow Ochre, and white). All the colors but red are cheap (and Rembrandt Permanent Red Medium has such strong tinting strength that you use very little of it). By the way, that palette makes an unbelievable range of beautiful colors.
If all else fails, just do it! (In the words of Nike.)

Here's the palette of one very well-known artist as he mixes some flesh tones.

When I was in art school I was told “starve yourself…don’t starve your palette!” When I finally took this to heart, my painting improved; yours will too.