What Are You Looking At?

As designers, we spend a lot of time crafting our images or graphics, but how much do we really know about how people look at them?

Greg Edwards uses eye tracking technology to understand how our eyes move over computer screens.

He helped create the Advanced Eye Interpretation Project at Stanford University, and is the CEO and founder of Eyetools, Inc. in San Francisco. Most of the work that Dr. Edwards currently does at Eyetools is to help clients understand how to make their websites communicate more effectively through a better understanding of viewer behavior.

The eye tracking tools have come a long way since the first pioneering work decades ago (see GJ post on the 1967 Yarbus eye tracking studies).

A typical basic hardware setup (this example from the lab at University of California San Diego) includes a non-invasive head-mounted system.


With eye tracking technology, scientists can carefully follow the saccades (jumps) and fixations of subject’s eyes as they review text and images on a computer screen. This graphic, sometimes called a scanpath or a gaze trace shows the sequence and position of an individual’s center of attention.


Scientists can also record the gaze behavior of a large group of people to find out what part of the design attracts the eyes the most, creating what’s known as a heatmap. The areas receiving the most attention are indicated in red and yellow. Areas receiving less attention are mapped in blue or dark.

The technology can also record the activity of the hands on the keyboard and mouse and correlate it with the gaze data.

Dr. Edwards and his team at Stanford were able to use this information to infer the mental state of the computer user. They called their technology “the eye interpretation engine.”

You can make basic inferences about mental states from this data. There’s a clear difference between “reading,” “scanning,” and “searching,” for example. Another discovery is that people look at banner ads even though they don't click on them.

As Dr. Edwards puts it, “the eye interpretation engine parses eye-position data into higher-level patterns that can then be used to infer a user's mental state or behavior.”

I asked Dr. Edwards if we can we tell from scanpath data if a subject is just looking at the style of a type font rather than reading the text? He replied:

“We can tell if a graphic designer is looking at the style of a type font or reading because the behavior changes -- looking at the font keeps the eyes localized in areas longer than would be natural as they examine the font, or the eye movement wouldn't be consistent since they would be looking at features of the font as the driving factor rather than the text itself. Now, could someone purposefully fool this to behave as if they were reading while they were actually examining the font? Yes, if one consciously did that. Would it occur naturally? No.”

I also wondered if it is possible develop higher levels of inference about the cognitive behavior behind eye behavior, to know not merely where someone is looking, but what they’re thinking when they’re looking at it.

For example, you might look at this woman’s red jacket and think that it doesn’t fit her right, and I might look at the same red coat and wonder where she bought it.

At the present time, Dr. Edwards told me, we cannot make such conclusions from the data. The purpose of his original patent work was not to determine what people were thinking, but to determine their mental state and current behavior—are they searching, examining, spacing out—which is different from thinking.

“You can see someone initially checking out the lay of the land of an unfamiliar scene, and you can see when they narrow in to focus on particular areas -- these are behavioral shifts that often happen very quickly and unconsciously -- people are not often able to accurate self report these. You can tell these with the scanpath data. You can't tell how they feel without some other means.”

It seems to me that this would be a very interesting area for future research, especially if eye tracking and keyboard/mouse data were combined with functional MRI (fMRI) data, which shows where activity is localized within the brain in real time.
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For more on fMRI data, check out the previous GurneyJourney post on Neuroaesthetics
Eye Interpretation Project, link.
Wikipedia article on eye tracking, link.
Eyetools blog, link.
Thanks to Dr. Edwards.

Softness in Eyes

I want to make a very simple point with this post: Keep the eyes simple. Downplay detail in them. Soften edges if you can.



I'll start with one of the greatest portrait painters of all time: Anthony Van Dyck. The eye of this old man looks complete, but note that the pupil doesn't have a hard edge, there are no individual eyelashes. The eyebrows aren't drawn as a bunch of separate hairs either.

The only part that's really crisp are the highlights, and they're more prominent in the lower lid and the lacrimal caruncula (the little watery pit on the inside corner of the eye).



In this woman's eye by Andrew Loomis, the pupil is sharper, but the iris is softened on the left side, and the eyelashes and eyebrows are softened and unified. He chooses to downplay the caruncula and the fold over the eye.

In this detail of a portrait by John Singer Sargent (click to enlarge) both eyes are greatly softened. There are some crisp edges, but look where he places them. They mainly occur in the structural forms surrounding the eye, not details within the eye itself, such as the iris, pupil or little hairs. 


Sargent spent as much time preparing the structure around the eye as he did painting the eye itself. He compared the process of painting an eye in its socket to dropping a poached egg on a plate. The subtle movement of muscles around the eye is what conveys the character of expression, perhaps even more the particular details within the eye.

Caruncula on Wikipedia

Eye Tracking and Composition, Part 2

Below is a scanpath image of the artwork that we saw in yesterday’s post. The chart represents the behavior of an individual who, with no prompting, looked at the artwork for a sixteen second period on a computer screen.

The computer recorded a series of circles, indicating where the eye paused momentarily, connected by a thin blue line.

The scanpath reveals that the eye darts unpredictably in straight jagged leaps known as saccades. Saccades occur between three and five times per second, alternating with brief periods of rest called fixations.

The white glow around each circle represents the subject’s peripheral vision. (The heavier blue shows a running average of the center of attention and the orange line is an attempt by the computer to detect reading behavior. Those lines are not important for the study of artwork.)

The numbered black boxes are time markers, indicating the position of the eye at each passing second. The session begins at the green dot and ends at the red dot, the last point of rest before the image disappeared. By following the blue line second by second, you can precisely reconstruct the viewer’s experience.

The test subject’s eye enters the composition at the top center and zigzags down to the figures at left center. This happens within the first second. In the next three seconds it swoops to the right, leaps upward to glance at the upper right corner, and then moves across the center of the picture in large strokes, pausing briefly to look at the near and far buildings.

For the remaining ten seconds the subject’s gaze slides back and forth in smaller saccades, examining the people in the scene.

According to Greg Edwards, President and CEO of Eyetools, “During the first 3 1/2 seconds, this particular person was getting the lay of the land. How long people take to get this initial overview will depend on each picture. They’re trying to understand the basic structure or the context of the picture.”

After that, they usually settle into finer eye movements. “If they make a big movement,” he said, “they’re typically searching for context. If they make a smaller movement, they’re looking for detail.”

The second person’s scanpath (above) both resembles and differs from the first one. The eye also makes large orienting moves initially, taking in the far vista and the full array of people below. But this scanpath shifts between large and small movements throughout the session and spends more of the time looking at the distant vista and the surrounding architecture.


It might be hard to make out these diagrams in small Web illustrations. For the sake of clarity, this video roughly reconstructs the sequence of saccades over the same approximate overall duration——though it doesn’t accurately represent the relative duration of each fixation.

Tomorrow we’ll see what we can learn from crunching together data from a lot of different observers, and I'll suggest some preliminary conclusions.
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Thanks, Greg! Link to Greg Edwards's Eyetools blog. and Eyetools website.

Related posts on GurneyJourney:
Eyetracking and Composition, part 1
Eyetracking and Composition, part 2
Eyetracking and Composition part 3
Introduction to eyetracking, link.
How perception of faces is coded differently, link.

Insect Vision

Thomas Shahan - Eye Arrangement of a Hogna Wolf Spider

What can insects and other arthropods see through their compound eyes?

Quick answer: they can see definite, resolved images. Some compound eyes yield a single erect image and others produce multiple inverted images. Their acuity is less than we can see with our single-lens vertebrate eye. Each optical cell in a compound eye can't form a very sharp image because the focal point always lies behind the retina.

But the view through compound eyes is not necessarily the super low-resolution hexagonal pixels or the kaleidoscopic multiplication effect that we've often seen in cartoony diagrams.

Arthropod eyes have certain advantages over our vertebrate single-lens eyes. They have a wider angle of view, infinite depth of field, fewer aberrations, and extreme sensitivity to motion. Their visual system operates within a tiny package, sometimes smaller than the head of a pin.


Most arthropods have not only the more familiar compound eyes, but also other kinds of optical sensors distributed on their bodies. These sensors may be specialized for perceiving light levels, movement, polarized light, expanded color vision, dim illumination, or heat signatures.

Eye structures vary among arthropods, a group that includes insects, spiders, crustaceans, and horseshoe crabs, plus extinct trilobites.


Engineers are working on artificial vision systems that enjoy the benefits of arthropod eye systems. They have been experimenting with imaging technology that delivers a full hemispheric field of view, using sensors crammed with hundreds or even thousands of individual imaging elements.

Artificial eye by CURVACE: Curved Artificial Compound Eye

Wikipedia on compound eyes
Wikipedia arthropod eye

Illustrations from Nature magazine: "Digital cameras with designs inspired by the arthropod eye"

Eye Magnets

Have a look at this painting of bears in a forest by Ivan Shishkin. As you look at the composition, take note of where your eyes travel.


Do the same thing with this one by Thomas Moran. What did you notice first? What parts of the picture did you just you glance at, and where do your eyes linger the longest?


Here’s another Turner. There are a lot of things to look at here. Allow your eyes to peruse it casually, but try to be aware of what they just glance at and where they spend the most time.

Here’s one by David Roberts. Where do you look first? How do your eyes explore the scene?

OK, one last picture. You saw this on an earlier post. Look at it again, and try to be aware of how your eyes track around the picture.

I asked you to play this game in order to pose a couple of fundamental questions: Does everyone look at pictures in the same way? And do we really understand how pictorial design influences the movements of our eyes?

Scientists have designed experiments to explore these questions. In 1967, Russian psychologist Alfred Yarbus developed sensitive instruments to track the involuntary jumping movement of the eyes, called “saccades.”


Here’s a map, or “scanpath,” of the movement of one person’s center of vision, or fovea, as it scans the bears in the forest. The eyes clearly fixate on the bears, but they also circulate generally around the perimeter of the picture.


Yarbus showed his subjects the Repin painting “They Did Not Expect Him.” The scene shows a prisoner returning to his family after a long exile. Yarbus asked his subjects a series of different leading questions, like how old the people were, or how rich they were, or how long the man was away. He found the chart of eye movements differed wildly each time. And the scanpaths varied from person to person.

These scanpath studies lead to a number of conclusions—and questions—for us as artists:

1. Different people don’t look at the same picture in the same way. And a single person will look at a given picture differently depending on what questions they bring to the image. This has profound implications to curators writing museum tags and comic artists writing word balloons.

2. Pictures do not “control” the eye. The viewer’s thought process plays a huge role in how their eyes travel through a composition.

3. Standard compositional theory assumes that our eyes follow contours. That doesn’t seem to happen at all. They never follow along the curve of the woman’s back, for example, they just jump from face to face. Of course we do perceive lines of action and flowing contours, but our eyes don’t actually follow along them.

I also wondered if there is any basis to the assumption in standard compositional theory that the eye is attracted to areas of strongest contrast. That’s why I showed you the Turner and the Roberts and the Moran. I noticed when I looked at those pictures that my attention was sometimes attracted to the edges with the least contrast.


In the Turner, for example, I found myself looking at the light-colored tower (1) more than the black gondola (2), which had much more contrast. Was that true for you, too?

My hunch is that the areas of strong contrast are somehow felt or registered by the peripheral vision, but that the eye’s center of vision quickly moves to other tasks, in this case to sorting out close contrasts.

To my knowledge, there hasn't been much scientific study at all on the subject of what's going on in our peripheral vision when we're decoding an image.

In any case, when it comes to how we look at pictures, there is more than just abstract design theory going on. Regardless of how the picture is designed in abstract terms, we seem to be involuntarily attracted to sorting out the human stories.

I hope you’ll share your own experience of looking at these pictures in the comment section. For more information on the science of eye tracking, check out this link:

Tomorrow: Stretching a Face

Eye tracking the stairway illusion

When I painted this Dinotopia image I wanted to do my own spin on the famous "infinite stairway" optical illusion invented by Lionel Penrose and M.C. Escher.

If you walk around the stairs clockwise, you proceed infinitely downstairs, and if you walk counterclockwise, you go upstairs forever without gaining in altitude.

"Scholar's Stairway," Oil on board, 12 x18 inches.

The way I painted it, the illusion is fairly subtle, and I wondered if other people even noticed the illusion, and if so, whether their eyes moved systematically around the stairs.

To find out, I asked vision scientist Greg Edwards, president of Eyetools, Inc., to run some eye tracking tests using this image as the subject.

Dr. Edwards had fifteen subjects look at my pictures on a computer screen for fifteen seconds each while a sensor tracked their eye movements in real time. Below is the eye track of one subject's experience. The colored line shows the pathway of the eyes, beginning randomly at the green circle. The numbers in the black squares show where they eye traveled at each second of the fifteen second session. 

One can’t know for sure without a follow-up interview, but evidently this particular observer didn’t notice the optical illusion.

The second image shows the "heatmap," which aggregates data from all fifteen observers. The red and orange blobs are the areas of the image received nearly 100% of people's attention. The rider on the brachiosaur took attention away from the central illusion. The dark blue and black areas received almost no attention. 

What can we conclude from the heatmap image? Viewers definitely looked at the figures, wherever I placed them. Beyond that, we can't say much because we didn't design a very thorough experiment. I would love to work with a larger sample size and to gather followup interview data, and ideally collect simultaneous fMRI data set to see if we could correlate cognitive behavior with eye movement. That way we could understand better what happens when people "get" the illusion. If there's any vision scientist who has the equipment and wants to try an experiment like this, please contact me.

This original painting is in the "Art of James Gurney" exhibition at UARTS museum in Philadelphia through November 16.
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Previous posts about my stairway painting:
Credit to Mr. Penrose
Using a Perspective Grid

Video Eye Tracking

In some previous posts, we’ve looked at how eyetracking technology tells us something about how people look at paintings. But what about movies? How does the element of motion influence the attention of the viewer?


Eye Movements during a segment on Chilli Plasters from TheDIEMProject on Vimeo.

(Feed readers may not get the video, so link to it here)

Scientists at the DIEM Project (Dynamic Images and Eye Movement) have shown snippets from films to viewers and tracked the movements of their eyes. In the case of this clip, 48 viewers participated, so the sampling size is quite large. In addition to little ovals showing where individuals glanced, the video is overlaid with a “heatmap” which compiles viewer data to show where the vast majority of viewers were looking at a given moment.

Here are some of my observations:
1. In scenes with an even overall visual texture (such as at 1 minute: 2 seconds), the center of gaze goes to a default position in the middle of the screen.
2. People seem to anchor their gaze on the nose of the face, perhaps “reading” the rest of the face in peripheral vision from that position.
3. Viewers tend to look at the person who is speaking (not surprisingly). Getting them to look at a listener in a dramatic film is a collaboration of acting, directing, and editing.
4. When one scene cuts to another, the eye hangs in its last focal point for a bit, so editors who place the focus for the next frame in the same location will do the viewers a favor.
5. Viewers are highly goal-driven in the way they look at movie scenes. They scan for meaning.
6. Anomalies attract attention, like the goop stuck on the side of the pot at 32 seconds.
7. In fast cutting, the eye reverts to the default center (1:14-1:18)...
8. ...Which suggests that most visual information in fast-cut action scenes in movies is processed from peripheral, not foveal information. So why bother with detailed VFX, other than to give eye-candy to DVD stop-frame hounds?
9. What the heck are chili plasters?


LINKAGE
More at the DIEM project.
Related previous posts on GurneyJourney:
Eyetracking and Composition, part 1
Eyetracking and Composition, part 2
Eyetracking and Composition part 3
Introduction to eyetracking, link.
How perception of faces is coded differently, link.
Eyetracking analysis of a scene "There Will be Blood"
University of Edinburgh, Visual Cognition Lab, Copyright 2009

Eye Tracking and Composition, Part 3

(Note: This is the third and final part of a series of posts adapted from Imaginative Realism, Andrews McMeel, October, 2009). Please follow these links to the earlier posts, Part 1 and Part 2.)

By adding together the eye movement data from a group of test subjects, we can learn where most people look in a given picture.

To create the image below, the eye-tracking technology recorded the scanpath data of sixteen different subjects and compiled the information into composite images, called heatmaps. The red and orange colors show where 80-100% of the subjects halted their gaze. The bluer or darker areas show where hardly anyone looked.

Here’s the heatmap for the painting Marketplace of Ideas, which we discussed in the last two posts.

It turns out that there was very little interest in either of the main vertical columns. Instead, the red splotches reveal a concentration of interest in the figures. There were secondary interest areas in the far buildings and the sign in the upper right.

The interest in people, especially faces, appears to reflect a hardwired instinct to understand our fellow humans.

In the heatmap for Chasing Shadows, which shows a group of children running along a beach with a Brachiosaurus, there’s a strong focal point around the dinosaur's front feet and the nearby running children.

There are secondary points of interest at the dinosaur’s head and the leading child. Note how the action of the walking pose was read without directly looking at the rear leg.

Other spots of interest congregate around the dinosaur’s tail, the base and the top of the tree, and the vanishing point along the beach.

Hardly anyone looked directly at the sky, the upper palm fronds, or the middle section of the palm trunk. But these areas were presumably perceived in the halo of peripheral vision around the center point of vision.

Have a look at this painting, and be aware of where your eyes travel.


The heatmap for the painting Camouflage (click to enlarge) shows that everyone noticed the dinosaur’s face. They also spotted the hidden man and the small pink dinosaur.

According to statistical data connected to timing, these three faces drew almost everyone’s attention within the first five seconds. The dinosaur's face was statistically the first thing most people looked at, followed quickly by the hiding man. Below is one subject's scanpath, with the black numbers counting off seconds.

I was surprised that the two patches of lichen on the tree above the man scored near 100% attention. Evidently viewers noticed these strange shapes in their peripheral vision and checked them to make sure they weren’t important, or somehow a threat to the man. From a narrative standpoint, I suppose they were a bit of a red herring, distracting with no payoff.

The sunken log and the detailed patch of leaves in the lower left drew 60% of the viewers, perhaps because those were likely places for other dangers to hide.

Just because an element has sharp detail or strong tonal contrasts, it doesn’t necessarily attract the eye. The dark branches behind the dinosaur’s head drew almost no attention because they fit into the natural schema of a forest scene. Apparently the viewers developed a search strategy based on the threatening situation of a hungry dinosaur looking for a bite to eat.

PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS
These experiments force us to question a few of our cherished notions about composition and picture-gazing.

1. The eye does not flow in smooth curves or circles, nor does it follow contours. It leaps from one point of interest to another. Curving lines or other devices may be "felt" in some way peripherally, but the eye doesn't move along them.

2. Placing an element on a golden section grid line doesn’t automatically attract attention. If an attention-getting element such as a face is placed in the scene, it will gather attention wherever you place it.

3. Two people don’t scan the same picture along the same route. But they do behave according to an overall strategy that alternates between establishing context and studying detail.

4. The viewer is not a passive player continuously controlled by a composition. Each person confronts an image actively, driven by a combination of conscious and unconscious impulses, which are influenced, but not determined, by the design of the picture.

5. The unconscious impulses seem to include the establishment of hierarchies of interest based on normal expectations or schema of a scene. For example, highly contrasting patterns of foliage or branches will not directly draw the gaze unless they are perceived as anomalous in the peripheral vision.

5. As pictorial designers we shouldn’t think in abstract terms alone. Abstract design elements do play a role in influencing where viewers look in a picture, but in pictures that include people or animals or a suggestion of a story, the human and narrative elements are what direct our exploration of a picture.

As Dr. Edwards succinctly puts it, “abstract design gets trumped by human stories.” The job of the artist, then, in composing pictures about people is to use abstract tools to reinforce the viewer’s natural desire to seek out a face and a story.

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Related posts on GurneyJourney:
Eyetracking and Composition, part 1
Eyetracking and Composition, part 2
Eyetracking and Composition part 3
Introduction to eyetracking, link.
How perception of faces is coded differently, link.

All the paintings are from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

Many thanks to the team at Eyetools, Inc. for their assistance.

To See, Your Eyes Must Move

In order to see anything, your eyes must move around. 

Painting by Magritte

In a classic scientific study back in 1976, John K. Stevens anesthetized test subjects but kept them awake. As they sat awake with their eyes open, but unable to move them, subjects found that the images quickly faded. 

Because they were unable to move their eyes across the visual field,  they couldn't re-stimulate the retina. Without constantly changing levels of stimulation, the neurons ceased delivering signals. 

The test subjects felt a strong impulse to move their eyes, and wanted to move them. It felt to them that moving their eyes would take a huge effort, and they just couldn't do it.

Another surprising result of the study was the sensation that the visual field was displaced in the direction of the anticipated jumping eye movement (or saccade) that they intended to make. 

As author Brian Dilg put it, "They were catching their own brains trying to make sense of an image that did not shift as it normally would when the eyes move."

What generates the impulse for a saccade? Vision specialist Dr. Martin Rolfs says, "When you analyze how many of our saccades are triggered by external events, you'd probably end up with very little. A part of the scene that has high contrast will probably capture your eye movements. But as soon as you have the second or third saccade, the influence of this basic visual information in the scene will become less important. Your own interests and your own task that you have at the moment will be much more influential."

This confirms an important insight for picture-makers. The observer's eye pathway does not follow passively through the composition like a ball on a track. It is driven by the viewer's own conscious and unconscious curiosity, and the artist's job is to awaken that active participation of the viewer.

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Scientific paper: PARALYSIS OF THE AWAKE HUMAN:VISUAL PERCEPTIONS 

More in the book "Why You Like This Photo" by Brian Dilg.  It's a gem of a book, designed for photographers, but full of insights about visual perception that artists can also benefit from.

Evolution of a Picture, Part 3 of 4: Maquettes and Animals

Ernest Meissonier, study for Friedland

This is Part 3 of a 1901 article called Evolution of a Picture: A Chapter on Studies by academy-trained Edgar Spier Cameron. Yesterday's installment discussed studies, facial expression, and drapery. Today we look at maquettes and animals.

Maquette by Meissonier

Part 3: Maquettes and Manikins
"Meissonier was so scrupulous in his drawing that he sometimes modeled his horses and sometimes his figures in wax from which to make his drawings.

"In a subject in which there are numerous figures, animals, or objects of similar size, the element of correct perspective is of great importance, and the grouping together of maquettes, or small models in wax or clay, makes it possible to avoid those errors which creep into the work of some of the greatest artists.

Lord Frederic Leighton in his studio

"Sir Frederic Leighton frequently made use of the plan, and it is said that Detaille, in composing his battle scenes, arranges whole companies of pewter soldiers on a table on which the inequalities of the surface of the ground have been represented in various ways.

"Maquettes and manikins are of great service in composing decorative subjects when it is desired to show figures in unusual positions requiring violent foreshortening, as in flying, or in a perspective system such as is sometimes used in ceiling decoration, with a vanishing point in the air.

Aimé Morot with the skin of a lion

Animals in Motion
"When animals are introduced into a picture many studies of them are necessary because of the great difficulty in securing a suitable pose or action, owing to their almost constant movement.

"In making studies of animal motion, many painters resort to the use of instantaneous photographs with the result that they frequently show movement too rapid to be observed by the human eye. In their efforts to avoid such solecism, artists have resorted to various devices to study the motions of the animals they paint.

Aimé Morot

"Aimé Morot, who has painted some of the most spirited cavalry charges ever reproduced on canvas, was attached to the General Staff of the French army, and had all the horses and men he desired at his disposition. His favorite mode of study was to have horses ridden past him, and at a certain point he would give one quick glance at his models, close his eyes, and open them only when he had diverted his gaze to the white surface of the paper held in his lap on which he quickly jotted down the impression received. (See previous post: Morot's motion device)

Horse study by Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier

"Meissonier had a track built, along which he had himself propelled as horses were ridden along a parallel course. Another excellent way for an artist to gain an appreciation of a horse's movement is to see and feel it at the same time by riding the animal along a wall in sunlight and observing its shadow."

Editor's note: The author is muralist and critic Edgar Spier Cameron (1862-1944) from Chicago. He studied at the Art Students League in New York and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His teachers were Dewing, Inness, Cabanel, Lefebvre, Boulanger, Laurens, and Benjamin-Constant.

Previously:

Evolution of the Picture, Part 1: Compositional Studies.

Evolution of the Picture, Part 2: Studies and Drapery
Morot's motion device

Books:
You can find more about these methods in my book Imaginative Realism.
Ernest Meissonier exhibition catalog.
Frederic Leighton Abrams book.

Sources and More Info:
Evolution of a Picture: A Chapter on Studies by Edgar Cameron in Brush and Pencil Magazine
Vol. 8, No. 3 (June, 1901), pp. 121-133

Harold Speed on Practical Color, part 1.

Today we'll take a look at Chapter 8: "Colour: Practical" from Harold Speed's 1924 art instruction book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials.

I'll present Speed's main points in boldface type either verbatim or paraphrased, followed by comments of my own. If you want to add a comment, please use the numbered points to refer to the relevant section of the chapter.

The first half of this chapter is about painting methods, and I'll just present a list of some of the main bullet points.

1. Throwing eyes out of focus vs. squinting
Speed says that the former is better for judging color; the latter for judging value. To be honest, I can't throw my eyes out of focus on command. I can sort of go cross-eyed, but I can't really blur everything out. Anyone have any tips for me?

Portrait by Harold Speed

2. Impressionists pioneered the scientific / objective painting of color.
They invented a way to make almost anything paintable. However, Speed reminds us that there are pitfalls to be guarded against: superficiality, slovenly drawing, and neglecting the beauty of deep shadows.

3. "When sunlight is seen in very strong quantities its component prismatic colours can be observed."
He says this is obvious even to the untrained eye. But I'm not quite sure what Speed means. I suppose he means something like a chromatic aberration in a lens. I can't really say I've experienced the colors "unmixing" in my eye. I can see halation effects, especially when I squint, but not the separation into component hues. Speed says that breaking up bright light into prismatic colors is the only way to convey strongly glaring light, but I would suggest that there are other ways, especially those used by JMW Turner and Frederic Church.

Speed then goes on to catalog a variety of painting methods, which I'll just list (for the sake of discussion) rather than try to recapitulate.

4. (page 177) "Method of old tempera painters: Painting color thinly over another repeatedly, thereby getting a play of two colours." 
Flesh painted in terra vert (greenish gray) with pinks and ochres thinly painted over. Vermeer's Lady at Virginal painted this way, Speed suggests.

Harold Speed, Old Tom, courtesy BBC

5. Painting opaque color into transparent; first scumbling the transparent all over, and then painting into it, leaving it to show through where necessary.
Speed reminds us that combining transparent and opaque colors gives the most potential for richness and variety.

6. "All colors are made warmer when painted over light grounds transparently, and all colors are made cooler when mixed with white."
This is a quality of paint mixing that just takes practice. "For sheer beauty of color," he says, "nothing can touch transparent color."

7. Movement in color. 
Big topic of this chapter. Speed talks about various ways to make colors change from one passage to another.

8. Finishing hot. 
When completing a painting using certain methods, you can't keep retouching it. Speed uses the comparison of driving an old car up a steep hill. If you don't make it over the top of the hill, you have to back up and start all over.

8. Broken color.
Spots of adjacent color that mix in the eye.

9. Mixing several colors on one brush load.

10. Pre-Raphaelite method: painting into a tacky white ground.

(oil technique) Has anyone tried this?

Holman Hunt by Harold Speed courtesy BBC.

11. Titian method: red and black, allowed to dry, over which you apply a thin film of white.

12. Pure glazing.

He says it's out of favor, but that beautiful effects can happen that way.

13. Putting a thin border of bright colors around the edges of large masses.

Cecilia Beaux and Wayne Thiebaud (above) comes to mind.

Next week—We'll follow along with his demo, which starts on page 125.

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In its original edition, the book is called "The Science and Practice of Oil Painting." Unfortunately it's not available in a free edition, but there's an inexpensive print edition that Dover publishes under a different title "Oil Painting Techniques and Materials (with a Sargent cover)," and there's also a Kindle edition.
Get my book "Color and Light" signed from my website or from Amazon.

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Bix Puppet Prototype

Here is a one-of-a-kind prototype of a Bix puppet. It was made by Hasbro for a proposed line of Dinotopia toys that was stalled when the Hollywood film went into turnaround in 1997.

The front half of Bix emerges through a piece of black cloth behind an arched door. Her skin is molded in flexible latex or silicon over a skeletal framework.

The operator is able to control the movement of her mouth, the tilt of her head, and the movement of the eye ridges by means of a set of levers in the back.

You can watch a brief video of the prototype's movement on my Public Facebook or my Instagram page.

In previous blog posts you can see other prototypes from the Hasbro presentation, including action figures, a skybax toy, a Sylvia doll, and a strutter model.

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