Loading

“Loading is a term applied to laying colours in thick masses on the lights, so as to make them project considerably from the surface, with the view of their being strongly illuminated by the light that falls on the picture, and thus mechanically to aid in producing roundness and relief, or in giving a sparkling effect to polished or glittering objects ; this artifice however, must be had recourse to sparingly, otherwise it defeats its own object, and gives the execution a coarse and vulgar air.”

—From an 1845 painting manual
Detail from a Rembrandt self portrait.
Previously on GJ: Impasto

Christen Købke

Christen Købke (1810-1848) was a realist painter who produced scrupulously observed landscapes and portraits. Unfortunately, he is not well known outside of his native Denmark.

This oil portrait of an old sailor dates from 1832, when he was just 22 years old.


The paintings of Købke (pronounced keub-kuh) were penetrating and uncompromising in their realism, placing him in the company of Thomas Eakins, Adolf von Menzel, Ivan Kramskoi, and John Constable.

Købke was active in the 1830s, during Denmark’ Golden Age. This was the time of Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard.

Why is he not better known? His paintings are very small (the sailor portrait is 12 x 10 inches); they show modest subjects; he didn’t sell paintings or otherwise engage with the critical establishment or the marketplace; few of his paintings left Denmark; and he died fairly young.

There’s a good book in English on him written by Sanford Schwartz (Timken Publishers, 1992) though the reproductions are small on the page.

Wikipedia
Exhibit through June 13 at London's National Gallery. (Video included on link).

Wheelbarrow

Sometimes I search far and wide for an exotic or "artistic" motif to paint. But I end up having the most fun painting a humdrum, ordinary subject that was sitting next to me all along.

Color Bleeding

Color bleeding is a term used in the computer graphics industry to describe the way the color of an illuminated surface influences the surfaces around it.

Traditional painters usually refer to the effect as “reflected light,” and you can see it in this photo of an Abe Lincoln bust with a colored card in direct sunlight.

Here is an example of a digital scene with simple direct illumination (left), and then again with color bleeding (right).

Note how the white ball in the right image is tinged with blue on one side and red on the other. The same colored spillover appears on the ceiling and the back wall.

The phenomenon is a hot subject in CG rendering right now because new techniques are emerging to accomplish it. The technique called ray-tracing conveys the effect very convincingly, but it takes a lot of computer rendering time.

A new technique, using a “point cloud,” to generate the effect, can be accomplished with a fraction of the rendering time.

The recent Pixar movie “Up” used this technique to great effect in the sequence where the house is floating through the upper atmosphere.

Here’s a good overview by a lighting expert from "Up" on CG Society (Part 1 and Part 2), explaining its use in “Up”

I’m indebted to Jason Hill of Blizzard for sharing his knowledge with me.

Natural Science Exhibition

Last Friday we visited the Focus on Nature exhibition at the New York State Museum in Albany.

This exhibit happens every two years, and brings together the work of over 70 natural science artists from 13 countries.

The artwork shows plants, insects, mammals, and amphibians, and is primarily executed in watercolor, colored pencil, and digital.

It was fun to meet the other artists, and we went upstairs in the museum to see the collection of jury award winning paintings from previous years.

Focus on Nature website
Follow the link to download the PDF of the catalog (23MB) with samples of artists's work and statements.

Sign Painters

UP THERE from Jon on Vimeo.

Malcolm Murray produced this 12-minute documentary about the artists who paint large exterior ads on the sides of buildings in New York City.

Thanks, Adrien!

Ball Balancing

Note to science fiction concept artists: if you’re not already designing robots and vehicles that cruise around on top of a single ball, do it. The future is already here.



YouTube: "A Robot That Balances on a Ball"
Via Best of YouTube.

Gorilla No-Threat Glasses

Inspired by a post on this blog, The Dutch Rotterdam Zoo offered some goofy but safe glasses for gorilla viewing.

"Earlier this month at the Dutch Rotterdam Zoo, an eleven year old male gorilla named Bokito escaped and ran rampant through the Zoo’s food court, injuring a woman when he bit and dragged her some distance. Now, health insurance company FBTO is distributing eye-contact disguising glasses that allow zoo visitors to stare all they like, a behavior that is threatening to most of the great apes."

More at Geekosystem
Previously on GJ: Gorilla Portraits

Working Small, Working Big

When we see artwork reproduced in books, it’s sometimes hard to get a sense of scale, which has a big effect on the making of the art.

Here is Lawrence Alma-Tadema working at his easel in the 1890s. Tadema frequently created finished paintings that were no more than 5 inches on their short side.

Dean Cornwell, by contrast, had to be hoisted up on ropes to paint his murals for the Los Angeles Library, which he completed in 1932. His foot was bandaged, having been hurt in an accident. He had to move to England to be trained in the art of mural painting, and to find suitable mural space.

The painting he is working on was called “Earth: Gold in the Ground,” one of eight subjects on California history, each measuring 12 feet wide by 19 feet high.

The library commission paid barely enough to pay his expenses. He had to borrow money from his life insurance policy to afford his children’s college education.

Sketch Posture

If you’re sketching without an easel or a drawing table, you have to hold your work at the most convenient angle.

This fellow artist at a sketch group shows an excellent posture for observational sketching from a seated position. She’s comfortably holding the book with her left hand while resting it on her crossed leg.

By holding the book at about 60 degrees, the book remains perpendicular to her viewing angle. This eliminates any danger of distortion caused by looking at the work foreshortened.

By holding the work as high as possible, close to her line of sight, she doesn’t have to tax her memory any more than necessary as she transfers her observation to her drawing.

In fact she doesn’t have to bob her head at all, an advantage when you’re drawing candid poses in public and you don’t want to draw attention to yourself.

Artists who hunch over a work laying flat in their laps make the job unnecessarily more difficult than it needs to be.¬