DweezelJazz Art Blog » Composition

Sketches, Digital Painting and Experimentation As Part of the Work Flow

DweezelJazz — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:03:00 +0000

Last week I sketched and inked a drawing of the Tower of London, scanned it into the computer and then painted it using Corel Painter Essentials and Adobe Photoshop.

This is the first time I’ve used Painter. The program came as bundled software with the wacom graphic tablet I got long ago and I finally slipped the disk into the computer and installed it.

Painter provides brushes that make it possible to quickly build texture into a painting, which otherwise takes me more effort to create in Photoshop. Painter also has a really nice color wheel that I find very intuitive and easy to use (I’m using version 3, the color wheel may have changed in version 4, it is said to have been improved).

After applying what might be called an ‘underpainting’ in Painter, I opened the file in Photoshop and continued painting, smoothing things, adding more emphasis to different colours and placing the final touches on it. I use a really great set of brushes in Photoshop, that I bought from Portland Studios, designed by Justin Gerard.

I love painting digitally. I don’t find that it takes less time or effort than painting with physical paints, but I love bright luminescent colors, and painting on the computer is very like painting with light.

When I was a kid, about 7 years old, I was often invited to go to a neighbor’s house to play. My friends had a light box with a plastic sheet/screen on it that had tiny holes through it sized to hold colored plastic pegs. The kit came with a variety of drawings etched in white on black paper.

The idea was to place the paper on the screen, push the colored pegs through the paper and the light behind, inside the box, made the peg light up. Punching those colored pegs through that black paper and seeing them light up brilliantly in the otherwise dark room was something I still remember vividly. The thrill of the finished ‘work of art’ gleaming in super bright colors! I guess some things about a person just don’t change with time: painting on the computer nowadays gives me similar delight.

Painting digitally is also a great way to investigate compositions and colors for a painting. I’ve used the computer to create a rough reference for a couple of the egg tempera paintings and also for some watercolor paintings. It’s an excellent way to experiment and learn. From now on I plan to make a digital painting rough part of my routine work flow to use as a reference in painting an egg tempera or watercolor piece.

Here’s one of the sketches, from the movie Chain Reaction, I drew and inked using a Pentel brush pen.

'At Party' Brush Pen Ink Sketch

Working With Photographs As Reference For Paintings

DweezelJazz — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:49:17 +0000

There are many stages involved in creating a painting of a scene. I’m an indoors type of painter so I like to use the convenience of a camera to record the details of a subject for future reference. Using photographs for reference is really great, if a few things are kept in mind and a couple of pitfalls avoided. The main elements that I have found to be of vital importance are:

composition
color
perspective
free nature of the art

Attention to Composition

The first thing to do is to capture the subject or place that you’re interested in with the camera. This can be a bit tricky. The number of photos I’ve taken only to find, when I get home, that they just don’t have what I’m looking for to inspire me to a painting. I’ve written a few posts about what I look for and strive for when taking photographs.

Cropping a photograph can make a tremendous difference to the feel of the subject. Understanding composition and using it to show off your subject in the most flattering way can change a prospective painting from dull and commonplace to really eye-catching.

I really liked this photo of trees in a park in England.

"Stourhead Majestic Trees" Reference Photo

Cropping it to an oval brings focus and a kind of movement to the trunks as the eye is drawn into the painting.

You can see more about the park that inspired this painting in a previous post: Egg Tempera Painting of “Stourhead Majestic Trees”.

It’s also fun to put together a composition from a variety of reference photos, as was done with the “Knight and Monument” watercolor painting shown below.

The monument is a war memorial from a photo I took in London from a double-deck bus; the trees are from the French Jura mountains; the greenery in the foreground was taken from a flowerbed in Geneva; and the Knight and his horse are taken from a variety of shots of people on horses from a movie – the man on the horse is different from the one on that horse in the movie. Creating this painting was a lot of fun.

Another facet of composition to be aware of is to exclude any details that are present in the photo that aren’t essential to the meaning of the piece, or may even be distracting from it. In this reference shot of a road in the town of Gex, France, the removal of the trash cans and cars, along with all the markings in the road, helped to focus on the real essence of the scene.

Reference Photo for View of Gex Town Hall from houses and church

Below you can see the watercolor painting, “Gex Church View”, that resulted from using this photo as a reference. The lamp that you can see at the top of the photo wasn’t included because it distracts from the main focus of the scene and draws the eye up, when it’s important for the art to draw the eye into the painting.

The painting is for the Gex Book. The back of the Gex Church is to the left, and there are houses to the right. Looking down the street you can see the dark grey turret of the Town Hall; it has the same distinctive clocks on all four sides. Beyond is the Geneva valley. In the distance, Le Saleve is visible to the right.

The Importance of Color

Color is one of the things that is probably the most influential of all factors in a painting. At least, I’ve discovered that this is true in my perception of artwork. If the colors are appealing to me, I am often immediately drawn to a painting, and then I look closely at the subject of it.

Even though I’m strongly driven by color, it has taken me quite some time to begin understanding how to use color to the most benefit. A short, but very clear article, that I’ve found very helpful is at Indezine.com: “What Is Color Theory”. I have also found the image of the color wheel shown on the book called “The Color Star” by Johannes Itten to be useful.

I haven’t read Itten’s book however, since one of the customer comments on Amazon.com mentioned that his books are extremely good, but that they are rather heavy in theory and somewhat complicated. Perceptions of complication are somewhat subjective, and whether it’s the case or not for this book I don’t know, but I decided to wait and see if I could achieve what I wanted with paintings before committing myself to further study!

The thing about cameras and computer screens, and printers for that matter, is that most of them all portray the same colors a bit differently. Some cameras are set to give a very bright, colorful rich image, while others tone down a lot of colors and almost give a blue tint to everything. My larger camera does the latter.

So it’s important to remember the colors and lighting of a place or subject that you saw as best as you can. Some artists do quick sketches and watercolors on site so that they can better remember the essence of the light and atmosphere of the place. Then they combine this with the use of photographs to provide more details. James Gurney has good articles on this and many other subjects at his blog Gurney Journey; one in particular on this subject is Using Photo Reference.

The reference photo shown below is somewhat limited in its color appeal. And there’s a tourist in the way! (No, I didn’t take this photo, but I was there.)

Reference Photo for View of Le Saleve and French Alps from Gex

I decided to portray what I know of the atmosphere and feel of the place in the following way with the painting, “Gex View Across The Valley”:

This painting too is one I’ve just completed for the Gex Book. There are spectacular views from the town of Gex, which is located in the foothills of the French Jura Mountains. In this painting you can see to the south of Gex, across the valley towards the city of Geneva in Switzerland. Le Saleve is the first set of hills on the other side of the valley. Le Saleve is in France and not Switzerland, the Swiss border ends pretty much at the foot of Le Saleve. The mountains beyond it belong to the Mont Blanc Massif.

Draft page layout Gex Book

Here you can see how it looks in the page layout for the book. In a previous post I mentioned that the other sketch that wasn’t yet completed on this page (which happens to be this painting, and is now completed) would be of a view down the valley towards Bellegarde – well, turns out it wasn’t – this one also faces towards Le Saleve! But there is a view looking down towards Bellegarde in at least one painting still to be done for the book, and it will be painted and shown here on DweezelJazz Art blog eventually.

Look out for Proper Perspective

Many camera lenses distort. Even with anti-distortion on, the distortion of lines, especially towards the edges of the image, can still be very pronounced. I was so surprised when I started looking more closely at just how much distortion can go unnoticed by the casual glance at a photo. It’s almost as if the eye makes up for it. But in a painting, I think it’s a different story. If the perspective is odd, then it most likely will get noticed, especially if it’s unintentional!

Making the Art Unencumbered and Expressive

It’s super easy to get lost in all the detail that a photograph provides. It can become an all-consuming goal to try to portray the scene or subject in all it’s complexity, with the utmost accuracy. Unless this is done with extreme care, this can quickly kill the feeling, life, and atmosphere of a piece. It’s very good to consciously decide in advance how much detail is wanted, and how it will advance the aim of what the painting will convey. Always staying aware of atmosphere, feeling, and even the emotions of the piece will help to maintain the focus of the goal for each painting. It will also help to consider these things when choosing the predominant colors for a painting.

More important than detail or accuracy is the conveyance of meaning, atmosphere, life, and what the artist finds uniquely interesting in a scene or object, rather than to present all its details in accurate duplication. Individual expression and viewpoint is what makes creating and observing art so endlessly fascinating.

Summertime Activities

DweezelJazz — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:43:20 +0000

Wheat almost ready to harvest

It has been a long time since the last post here on DweezelJazz Art blog. There have been a combination of things that made this so. What started it was that we lost our Internet connection for six weeks. Our Internet Service Provider, who will remain nameless here, upgraded their service, but unfortunately they lost our connection altogether and never found it again! So we switched providers. In France it takes a long time for a new provider to set up the line. But we’ve been back online for a few weeks now and everything is working very nicely.

Green Summer Countryside

We’ve had a very unusual summer here – it has rained so much that everything has stayed green and it looks like the high Alps in summertime. It’s absolutely beautiful. The air has been cleaned every few days by another downpour and lots of wind, but we’ve also had a lot of bright, shiny sunshine. It has been idyllic.

Corn Field

We’ve watched and heard the sparrows nesting in the eaves of our house. The swallows and house martins, also living around here, are cleaning up all of the mosquitoes in the area – we haven’t been bitten once at home! The swallows are fantastic to watch as they swoop gracefully back and forth, nearly colliding with the walls when they get close to the house. The roosters and chickens in the large open field next to us have been announcing themselves loudly and are a real joy to watch as they bound and run across the tall grass, always busy.

Jet D'Eau Geneva Switzerland

It has also been an eventful summer, as a result of something that happened way back in February. I went to the dentist to have a fixed orthodontic retainer glued back on. (Visits to the dentist have taken me frequently into Geneva and so I’ve witnessed summer in town too, as you can see in the photos.) This simple goal turned out to be far more involved than I at first thought. The dentist took one look at me, asked me all about any symptoms I experienced and then he announced that he thought he might be able to largely remove those symptoms: migraines, nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, extreme fatigue, difficulty breathing, lung discomfort, neck and back muscle cramps, lack of sleep, and so on.

And, to my utmost amazement, in addition to the removal of these symptoms, I found that I no longer had reactions to being around perfumes, cleaning products and other toxic chemicals I have hitherto found increasingly difficult to endure. I didn’t rush out to put these things in my environment, but it was fabulous not to feel like someone had laid out kryptonite around me every time I went out somewhere.

Place du Bourg de Four, Old Town Geneva, Switzerland

I’ve lived with these difficulties all my life and had come to accept them as part of life, at least my life. So it has been with amazement that I’ve discovered that these myriad symptoms are indeed entirely due to jaw misalignment. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about this in the last months; it hasn’t been easy and has taken a huge amount of thinking and observing on my part, all the while trying to learn fast enough so as not to fall back into the abyss of pain-ridden exhaustion. Life rarely offers a magic bullet. My situation isn’t totally resolved and I’m still trying to find out if there’s a long-term solution to correct the jaw alignment.

Parc des Bastions, Geneva, Switzerland

The great thing is that along the way, there have been times during the last months that I’ve been the most pain-free I’ve ever been – in fact, I didn’t know what it was like to be that pain-free – didn’t know what it was like to have energy, and long, deep nights of sleep. Fantastic! So I took advantage of it!

Looking up at back of Old Town Geneva from opposite the Parc des Bastions

In June I finished the Total Training Online Course on Adobe Dreamweaver, and within a couple of weeks I designed a completely new look for DweezelJazz Art site, with new galleries and descriptive content for the paintings.

Then I worked on a number of drawings for paintings in egg tempera, inked them…

Inked drawings ready to glue onto the tempered glass.

and then glued them onto tempered glass.

Drawings ready to be underpainted, and then prepped for painting with egg tempera.

As I was doing this, and also preparing some drawings for painting in watercolor, Tony came up with a brilliant idea: what about creating a book of paintings? Well, I have wanted to do something of that kind for a long time, dreaming about it. I decided to bite the bullet. I chose the subject, in fact, if I survive the first book, I plan to do a series of them: each book dedicated to a town and area in the Pays de Gex, France / Geneva, Switzerland area.

I started with a plan to fill a 60-page book, large format. So I created a storyboard for the entire book, including image sizes and placement.

Storyboard for the first book.

Then I started drawing and drawing and drawing.

A drawing for the book.

I’m including scenes in towns and in the countryside around them, so that the book will give the feel of the place as a whole.

This is what I call a "cow bus".

Quite often at the beginning of summer, you can see tractors hauling a trailer full of cows out to the fields, and again in fall taking them back to the warmth of the barns. It almost seems like the cows are being transported to school or something, so I call it a ‘cow bus’.

I’ve completed 64 drawings and have 18 left to do. Then, all I have to do is paint them! I’ll paint them probably using a combination of ink and watercolor. And of course add text to accompany the paintings.

Sunflower

So, if you’ve managed to read this entire post and have reached this far: thank you! Thank you for reading this blog, and if you’ve been a reader for some time, thank you for continuing to read DweezelJazz Art blog. I don’t post as often as I used to because I’ve had to prioritize the precious commodity of time, but I do plan to continue posting and have some photos of pretty places and countryside ready for future posts. I’m very happy if you find it interesting and fun. Life is full of beautiful things, to cherish and enjoy, and I try to share a little of that here.

This sunflower, for example, just wouldn’t pose correctly for the photo – I reckon it was a bit drunk out there in the fresh air – couldn’t focus on having it’s photo taken! But it is beautiful, nonetheless.

Book Review: “Directing the Story” by Francis Glebas

DweezelJazz — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 13:40:53 +0000

Cover of the book: "Directing the Story" by Francis Glebas

I’ve just finished working through the book, Directing the Story by Francis Glebas. This is a fantastic book.

If you’re interested in learning how to create a story that will capture an audience’s attention and how to portray this visually, then this is a very valuable book to have. The book concentrates on the application of these principles to film, but the information is pertinent to all levels of visual portrayal of stories.

It’s even a great book for someone interested in learning what it takes to create a good story, without considering the visual portrayal of it. Glebas is extremely generous in sharing his knowledge and he does it in an entertaining way too, with lots of storyboards to illustrate his points.

Glebas delves deeply into what makes us watch movies and why we go for stories. Having an understanding of what audiences look for in a story, he then shows us how to provide this in the storytelling. He shows how to transfer the story from words to images through the use of storyboards. He gives insight into what’s important in terms of camera angles, composition, cutting and editing, lighting. He gives great advice on how to draw for the storyboards and artwork, and also discusses the importance of character expressions and design.

The book is crammed with great information and is one of the most pivotal books about art and visual presentation that I’ve come across. Glebas explains things in a way that makes them very easy to understand. I highly recommend it.

Photographic Composition: Choosing The Focus

DweezelJazz — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 07:00:00 +0000

What you choose to focus on when taking a photograph largely determines what meaning that image will convey. This is one of the most significant choices to be made before snapping the shot.An effective way to demonstrate this is to look at images whose content are almost identical, but whose composition is altered by the choice of focus. Almost identical images can have a completely different impact on the observer.The following two photos show Mt. Blanc in the distance with a corn field in the foreground. (Click on images to see larger.) The first photo focuses on Mt. Blanc and the mountain ranges in front of it, while the second focuses on the corn field. In this photo Mt. Blanc is the predo- minant subject. Here the corn field serves to indicate the local environment and emphasizes the distance to Mt. Blanc.In the second photo the corn field and its immediate surrounds are the subject of the photo. The almost dreamlike vision of Mt. Blanc in the background gives the scene added charm and majesty. The sky here appears almost flat; it’s almost as if the mountain and the sky are a flat backdrop. While in the first photo, the sky has more depth and feels present equally over the cornfield as over Mt. Blanc.This somewhat dull photograph is transformed into something almost abstract by a change of focus.With the focus on the window, the raindrops come to the fore. The image is intriguing. The softness of the colors in the muted scene are pleasant and the eye moves around the entire image looking at the different raindrops. It’s soothing and gentle, almost like watching the nuances in a fire or a flowing stream.Another way of choosing the focus is to allow different amounts of content into a scene.The next two photographs illustrate this point. They are very similar, but the second includes slightly more foreground than the first, making the scene even more appealing.In the photo below, the observer is able to see the wild flowers in the field alongside the house.This gives the scene a sweeter look. It emphasizes that the house is in the countryside, adding a more peaceful atmosphere to the composition.This is further enhanced by the fact that the white line down the center of the road gives the impression of movement, contrasting with the lazy feel of the quiet, calm house and its surrounds.This photo is about a statue (and, unfortunately, a bollard).The one below is about a statue, and a bridge decorated with colorful flags in a festive town in the mountains (and, a bollard). If you can mentally edit out the bollard, you can see that the choice of subject focus here completely changes the message of the image. (If you can’t, I guess these photos might also show that I was unable to get out of the car to take the photos without the bollard.)Two shots taken of the same mountain at almost the same moment convey a completely different feeling. This one shows the grandeur of the mountain, giving a scale of height and enhancing that largeness by the contrasting house at the bottom of the picture. The clouds in the sky show change and movement.The second photo zooms in to focus on the peak, giving more detail and yet, at the same time, less information. The fascination focuses on the cloud close to the peaks and in the ruggedness of the cliff faces. The mood set here is slightly oppressive with the cloud sweeping low.And last of all, though hazy scenes can be appropriate sometimes, getting the camera to focus before pressing the button to take the shot is usually preferable.

Patterns and Textures In Composition

DweezelJazz — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Patterns and texture used in isolation to create a composition can give rise to an almost abstract image. It can even be difficult for the viewer to decipher what the subject is. This can lead to an atmospheric piece in which many ideas come to mind, producing for the person more of a superposition of feelings when looking at the image.For example, the photograph here might be a number of things. The mind can search for what seems most likely, and in doing so, it’s almost as if the image becomes all of them at the same time. This might fascinate the observer and render the composition more interesting.Another effect is that the variation in color throughout the composition has increased importance. It can become almost like observing a fire in which the variations in flame color can intrigue an observer for long periods of time.The selection and focus on texture to enhance the appeal of a subject is also very effective.Focusing on patterns in nature can draw greater awareness and appreciation for the intricacies that we may not have time to stop outdoors for long enough to study closely.Trees and their bark can be fascinating subjects.This tree trunk seems to have a character of its own. Letting the imagination run, it can almost seem that there’s a horse and a person hidden in its folds.The soft, slightly varied repetition of the pattern of flower bunches in this image give it a gentle, soothing radiance. The cascade in the tree branch is fun to follow.The pattern generates a direction of movement from the upper left to lower right of the image.The movement generated by patterns can be consciously used in a composition to attract and guide an observer’s eye.Shapes that don’t follow an exact, repetitive geometrical rule can create a scene that’s relaxing to look at.The next image is somehow haunting, and what might seem at first to be a dull rendition, keeps pulling the eyes back to it to look some more.Even though the background is a similar color to the flower, the texture of the background throws the flower into unexpected relief, where every detail on the flower is important.The window light falling on the floor stones creates a very mellow, earthy feeling.The sky is a source of an infinite variety of changing patterns and textures.Whether your art is photography, painting, or even graphic design, the directed use of patterns and textures in a composition is extremely important for creating a desired impact.