A Whiter White Paint

Scientists at Purdue University have developed a white pigment that they say is significantly whiter than existing pigments. A surface looks white because it reflects back a diffuse version of most of the the light hitting it. 

This new pigment reflects back up to 98% of the sunlight, while commercially available white pigments only reflect back between 80 and 90 percent.

 

Professor Xiulin Ruan with a sample of his "ultra-white" paint, courtesy BBC and Purdue

According to the BBC:

"The new paint contains a compound called barium sulfate, which is also used to make photo paper and cosmetics. 'We used a very high concentration of the compound particles,' explained Prof Ruan. 'And we use lots of different sizes of particles, because sunlight has different colours at the different wavelength.' How much each particle scatters light depends on its size, 'so we deliberately used different particle sizes to scatter each wavelength.'"

The new white pigment should be more reasonably affordable and available compared to the ultra black "Vantablack" or the new blue pigment that I mentioned in 2016.

It looks intriguing. I'd like to see how it looks next to Titanium or lead white. But I don't know how useful it would be to me as a painter because I almost always want to darken my lightest light and raise my darkest dark in a picture anyway. The challenge isn't pushing the absolute range of values but rather organizing the tones so that the picture makes sense.

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Thanks, Joseph and Dan

"Paint an Abandoned House" Challenge

Andrew Wyeth, Open House

A while ago I asked which subject would interest you the most for the next plein-air painting challenge.

"Abandoned House" was a clear winner. So I invite you to paint an abandoned house from observation.

Old Mill by Vasily Polenov

GUIDELINES
• Free to enter. Anyone of any age can enter.

• The composition can include the scene around the abandoned house. It can also be an abandoned store, restaurant, or factory. It can be an exterior or an interior, but you might want to get permission before entering an abandoned building. 

• Five finalists will each receive a "Department of Art" patch and a free Gumroad art tutorial download.

• It must be painted on location, or at least started on location. You can finish it from photos.

• You can focus your post on the decadence or nostalgia, the sublime aspects, the technical insights, the beauty or the ugliness, or the human story. Just make sure your painting expresses what interested you.

• All painting media accepted, such as oil, watercolor, acrylic, gouache, acryla-gouache, alkyd, casein, or water-soluble colored pencils. The painting can be bound in a sketchbook or on a separate panel or canvas.

• Take a photo of the work in progress on location, and another photo of the finished painting.

• Please limit your palette of colors to three colors plus white, and tell us what colors you used.

• Please post your entries on the comments of this Facebook page. If you're not on Facebook, please ask for the assistance of someone else who is.

• Enter just one piece. If you do two pieces, please upload your favorite one.

• You can enter as soon as you finish the piece, but no later than the deadline: sunset, Eastern Time, Friday, May 21, 2021. 

• Winners will be announced on this page and on my on Wednesday, May 26, 2021.

If you haven't seen it yet, here's a video of a painting of an abandoned house with a surprising human encounter.

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Check out some of our previous challenges: 

Paint a Cell Tower Challenge Results

Storefront Challenge Results
Dead Vehicle Challenge Results

The Humboldt Exhibition Moves Online

Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey had completed the years-long task of gathering the art and artifacts for her Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition about Alexander von Humboldt, which was scheduled to open in the spring of 2020.

Frederic Edwin Church, The Falls of Tequendama, Near Bogotá, New Grenada, 

1854, oil on canvas 60 7/16 x 48 1/16 in., Cincinnati Art Museum

Then the pandemic lockdown happened.

When the date was set for the staff to exit the building, she knew she might not be able to visit it again. So while she still had access, she had a brainstorm: why not document the show with a curator's tour? 

She found a videographer. Without time to prepare a script or dress up for the occasion, she did an off-the-cuff video walkthrough of the exhibition. 

It's an inspired presentation: coherent, eloquent, accurate, and concise, especially when you realize how spontaneous it was.   

The curators and education team produced videos and images for an online experience, which you can still see on their website.

One of them is a video focusing on Frederic Church's "Heart of the Andes." The video separates spatial layers and uses lateral parallax movements to create "an immersive journey."

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More

• Museum website / Smithsonian Art Museum, reopening spring 2021

• Catalog: Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture

• Another book by E.J. Harvey: 

The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature, 1830-1880

Thanks, Ida

Imitation vs. Representation

 

"Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure, undiluted, untouched joy." —Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A plant like this forsythia is more than the sum of its flowers and branches. I have to invent a toolset of brush techniques for describing characteristics of the flowers, both in terms of the overall mass and the granular detail.

Complete imitation of every flower on a forsythia plant is probably not possible or even desirable. We have to recreate or represent the characteristic detail rather than imitate it.

Asher B. Durand, in his influential 1855 essays "Letters on Landscape Painting" draws this very distinction between imitation and representation. When painting something as complex as a tree, he says, “direct imitation is impossible." Instead the artist should strive to “represent this foliage in every essential characteristic, without defining the forms of individual leaves. To do this, some analysis of its structure is necessary.”

Watch the video on YouTube

Painting Forsythia Flowers

I paint the flowers of a forsythia shrub using a limited palette of watercolor and gouache. I show how to start by capturing the overall gesture and silhouette of the whole plant and then subdivide the mass into smaller shapes.

Full video on YouTube 

ART SUPPLIES: 

White gouache 

Cadmium yellow

Cerulean blue 

Scarlet pyrrol

Burnt sienna

Water cup 

VIDEO TUTORIALS: 

“Watercolor in the Wild” (Download or stream on Gumroad)  

"Flower Painting in the Wild" (Gumroad): 

"Gouache in the Wild" (Gumroad)

"Gouache in the Wild" on (DVD): 

“How to Make a Sketch Easel” (DVD) 

“Watercolor in the Wild” (Download) 

Combining Pencil and Oil

 

Our boat brought us to a settlement of crested hadrosaurs and their human assistants, where we spent a few days drying out in the smoky attics of their houses" 

The painting is done in oil wash over pencil on illustration board, which has been sealed first with some workable fixative spray and then with a thin layer of acrylic matte medium. 

Dinotopian flight instructor Oolu holds a lightweight skybax saddle. 

This technique is fast, direct, and reproduces well. 

handeyeoriginals asks: "What do you thin the oils with to make the wash?"

Answer: Liquin (a fast-drying alkyd medium) and Gamsol (a mineral solvent). Note that both of those are toxic, so you need good ventilation and protection for the skin of your hands.

joeybruceartWhat’s the advantage of an oil wash instead of watercolour?
Colour? Vibrancy?


Answer: It's workable for a longer period and it blends well with opaques.
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Illustrations from Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time.

Colexification

Colexification refers to a method of mapping the meanings of words.

 

All languages have words for basic emotions like love and anger and shame, but the words may not convey the same meanings in different cultures. 

This way of mapping visualizes the proximity of related emotion words and the connections between them.

These maps are used by scientists to speculate about whether the emotion concepts are genetically coded or are culturally disseminated.

Read more about colexification in Science Magazine 

Text Driven Manipulation

Suppose an art director looked at one of your pieces and said "Great, but could you make it more goth?" 

You'd know what to do, right? How about taking a cat picture and making it more cute or changing a tiger into a lion?

Computers, using large data sets, can accomplish such manipulations. In the top row of each pair is the input image. Below that is the manipulation. The phrase is the text prompt used to drive the manipulation.

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See the scientific paper: StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery 

The Clock in Bryan, Texas

Downtown Clock, Bryan, Texas, gouache 

For this 45 minute gouache sketch I used ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow, burnt sienna, and white.

The Lap Box

Eugen Dücker 1841-1916 painted this portrait—possibly a self portrait—in 1900, showing a portable lap box rig used frequently by plein-air painters at the time.  

The artist sits on a tripod chair with a wooden box open and the painting pinned or propped on the inside of the lid. There also seems to be a white umbrella folded up on the ground next to him.

The arrangement has several disadvantages: you can't easily stand up or back up from the work; the size of the painting is governed by the size of the lid, and unless you have slots cut into the top frame there's no easy way to store wet paintings.  

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Read more about 19th-century plein-air painting methods in the book The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature 1830-1880