Paint Landscape

Acrylics - Satan's Paint

I've tried all kinds of paint. I spent a lot of time using acrylics. At art college we were taught to mix our own using Spectrum PVA, base, and pigments. One of the tutors gave me a sample pack of Liquitex to try. It seemed the height of arty luxury, to be able to buy paint in pre-mixed tones. After art college I used Winsor & Newton acrylics for a while.

And today I wouldn't touch any of them with a bargepole.

It's not a quality thing; any proprietary brand of acrylic paint is probably just as permanent and lightfast as comparable oil paint. But I'd rather bite off my own arm than use acrylics ever again.

Why? Three reasons: drying time, handling, and colour change.

Acrylics dry quickly. That's a good thing, right? Not really. You have to work fast with acrylics, or you can find yourself with a handful of ruined brushes. Sometimes working fast is a good thing - but working at a pace you choose is usually better.

If you're working in an alla prima technique, oil paint allows you to put down a brushstroke of the correct tone and colour immediately. With acrylics, the handling means you're trapped between applying the paint like watercolour or using full impasto. There doesn't seem to be a happy place between those two. You're working in layers, like tempera, that start off transparent and build up to opacity, or you're using the paint full thickness. I always ended up fighting acrylic paint or using workarounds to get something like the result I wanted. Compromising with your materials is a bad way to work.

When acrylics dry, there's a tonal change between wet and dry paint. The paint dries around a half tone darker than when you put it on. That just doesn't happen with oils. I don't want to be constantly second guessing myself and trying to judge a tonal change between wet and dry paint when I'm working.

Bottom line? When I use oil paint, I know what to expect. I can use it to make opaque marks, or the thinnest of glazes. It dries the same tone and colour as the pile I mixed on my palette. I can scumble it, scrub it in, blend it, paint fine lines or thick juicy impasto, and it'll never surprise me in a bad way. Whatever advantages acrylics offer - and for the life of me, I can't think what they are - they just don't compare, for me, with ordinary oil paint. Using acrylics is like painting with boxing gloves on. It can be done, but not well. And why would you?

making a tonal scale in GIMP

Having used a bucket full of oil paint to make a tonal ruler with which to regulate the tones of my paintings, I decided it might work out cheaper to do it with electrons.

I opened up GIMP and started messing with the colour control to make some clean neutral greys.

You can accesss the colour controls in the Toolbox icon by clicking on the foreground or background colour squares to open the colour selection dialogue. I use the default HTML notation that defines a colour by giving it a number that corresponds to its Red, Green, and Blue components. For example, 000000 = Black. ffffff = White. ff0000 = Red. 00ff00 = Green. 0000ff = Blue.

The numbers are in hexadecimal, which just means that they're in base 16: 0 to 9, then a,b,c,d,e,f. 0 is the lowest value and f the highest.

I can tell it's getting complicated because my head is starting to hurt. Bottom line? Simple code number gives precise colour swatch. And when the RGB components are equal, you get a clean grey, because no one colour predominates.

Anyway.

What this means is that you can make very precisely stepped greys all the way from white to black. Which is great for making a tonal scale. I ended up using these colours -

ffffff
dfdfdf
cfcfcf
bfbfbf
afafaf
9f9f9f
8f8f8f
7f7f7f
------------777777 = background mid grey
6f6f6f
5f5f5f
4f4f4f
3f3f3f
2f2f2f
1f1f1f
0f0f0f
000000

- Which give a clean 16 step scale that looks somewhat neater than the 10 step scale I made with oil paint on index cards, and will last for as long as computers do. Working in paint I found it hard to judge the darker tones by eye, which is pretty much what you'd expect. The paint surface isn't perfectly matt, and reflects enough light to make the darker greys hard to see.

Why bother at all? Because tone is the most important part of a painting. It's what you see from across a room. If you have a clear, simple tonal plan, your painting will hang together and look good.

But if the tones are left to their own devices, it will look exactly like you did just that. To use a musical analogy, it's like making music without deciding what key you're playing in. No tonal plan = an ill conceived mess.

It doesn't have to be complicated, in fact it'll probably work better if it's as simple as you can make it. But it does have to be there.

A tonal scale, like this one, will help you plan the tones of your painting. To download it, right click on the image to open it full size in another tab. Then right click again and choose 'Save Image As' to download to your computer.

introverted horse

I'm wary of horses. They are, after all, large animals, and capable of inflicting serious injury. Plus, it has been my unfortunate experience that every animal with which I ever became more than casually acquainted, would, at some point, try to kill and eat me.

Nonetheless, I was undeterred when I had an opportunity to draw some horses on my way back from a drawing expedition. I'd noticed three piebald ponies tethered in a field en route to my drawing spot. Only one was there when I returned, and he didn't take kindly to being stared at.

Some horses love it when you take an interest. They wander over and try to eat your drawing book. They hang around looking hopeful, in case you have carrots or Polo mints.

This horse was having none of it. He grazed a little, then moved into another pose before I could get busy with the first one. Then he moved again. And again. Until finally he'd strayed to the full extent of his tether and was hiding in the cover of a tree over the stream. Peering out now and then to see if I'd gone.

I can take a hint.

I passed by the next day on the other side of the field, and found him once again sheltering in the trees. This time he seemed happy to stand and pose for the few minutes I spent on a drawing.

And the moral of this slight tale is: if you chance upon a socially anxious horse who refuses to be drawn, give him some breathing space and come back the next day from a different angle. Also, be aware that his new attitude may well be a trap, and keep checking to make sure his equine accomplices aren't attempting to sneak up behind you with meat cleavers grasped awkwardly in their raised hooves.

they move the scenery

You have to paint like you're in a race. I've written before, here, about how things get changed around, out in the country, and it just happened to me again.

After my last post about transferring an image to a primed board, I went to paint that scene. And everything was different.

I'd started the drawing on drizzly days with heavy grey clouds. Now it was sunny and bright, with rim lit cumulus.

There was lovely, long, luscious grass that was full of textures and colour. Which I'm going to be painting from memory, since the farmer started mowing it the minute I set up my easel and began to paint.

A return to the same spot for a second session went well. I have a new favourite colour: Mars Orange mixed with Burnt Umber to make a warm undercoat for the sky. After two hours on site, I have enough information to finish the painting at home. Which is just as well, since the farmer started mowing again the moment I showed up. If I'd stayed any longer I suspect he'd have started cutting down the trees I was painting.

When I am Emperor, I shall hire teams of midget thespians to disguise themselves as grey aliens and terrorize the local farming community, so that they cower indoors and refrain from mowing their fields. At least until I'm done painting them.


By Jeremy Burgin on Flickr

Using GIMP to transfer a drawing to a support

Being out of tracing paper, and wishing to transfer a drawing to a support so I could paint on it tomorrow, I used GIMP and a reference photograph to work around it.

I open the photograph in GIMP and use the Rectangle Select Tool to crop the image.

Toolbox - Rectangle Select Tool
Image - Crop to Selection

Because the image is straight from the camera, it's a bit unwieldy for my puny computer at around 3600 x 2500 pixels even after cropping, so I scale the image to reduce the size.

Image - Scale Image

I reduce the image to 1000 pixels across and 718 pixels high. This makes it easier for my underpowered system box to hump the pixels around while I'm doing this.

The idea is to print out the photograph on some A4 paper and chalk the back of this so I can draw around the image to transfer the outline to a piece of primed board. To save toner and have a clear image, I need to reduce the image to mostly just an outline. To do that, I use an Edge-Detect filter.

Filters - Edge Detect - Edge
Algorithm - Sobel (Like I know what this means.)
Amount - 2.0

This picks out all the edge detail in the photograph but turns everything dark. So now, to get minimal black on white lines, we go to

Colour - Invert

This leaves us with a fairly clean line image, which is still in colour. To get rid of the colour, use

Colours - Posterize

and select 2 colours. Then go back into

Colours - Desaturate

where you will have the choice between choosing your shade of grey based on Lightness, Luminosity, or their Average. They're all subtly different, and it's worth trying out all three before you choose the one that suits your image best.

So now I have the image I need, but is it the right size for printing? Go to

Image - Print Size

I choose 'inches' because I don't do metric. I change the width to 11.000", and clicking on the height automatically changes that to 7.898" in this case. That will fit on a sheet of A4 and give me the size of drawing I need. Press 'OK'.

To print it out, I go to

File - Page Setup

and choose Landscape. Then I go to

File - Print

This brings up another dialogue in which you can check your settings before you commit to a print. Check the tiny preview on the Image Settings, and if you're happy with that, click Print.

And I end up with the image I want on a sheet of A4, ready to transfer to a 10" x 12" primed board. You can do this by covering the rear of the paper with pastel, taping it to the board and going over the outlines with a ballpoint.

Just to be clear, this isn't going to turn into a slavish copy of a photograph. That would be pointless at best. It's just a quick way to get an image outline onto a support. That outline is still subject to all the painting decisions I'll make in front of the real subject. Trees will be moved. Colours will be pushed, squished, or otherwise abused. Individual blades of grass will be cruelly ignored while I make bold and decisive brush marks in juicy paint. Skies will be invented, applied, and discarded.

art history shenanigans

Here's how art history was taught to me:

Academic art ruled at the start of the nineteenth century, but because it was bad - for reasons which no one ever explained - and brown, it was up to Impressionism to save the day with colour. Post impressionism came next and evolved into Cubism, when Cezanne paved the way for Picasso's demolition job. Then along came Dada and Surrealism, plus Vorticism and some other ugly, spiky stuff. Abstract Expressionism was the next big thing, followed by Pop Art, and a bunch of other movements no one remembers, and Photorealism.

Then everybody got tired of thinking up names and they just called all the new art Post Modernism but still kept writing reams of guff about it.

And that brings us up to date. This version of art history cherry picks its facts, imposes an evolutionary narrative, and leaves out those artists who don't fit. It's dishonest.

Realist figurative painting didn't just stop in all that time. It was just marginalized by art critics, and sneeringly condescended to.

'This denigration of academic art reached its peak through the writings of art critic Clement Greenberg who stated that all academic art is "kitsch". References to academic art were gradually removed from histories of art and textbooks by modernists, who justified doing this in the name of cultural revolution. For most of the 20th century, academic art was completely obscured, only brought up rarely,...for the purpose of ridiculing it and the bourgeois society which supported it, laying a groundwork for the importance of modernism...'

Wikipedia

The only trustworthy version of art history is the one you write for yourself. Exposure to art you might never have had the chance to see can only help you expand your view of what art matters. So here's a different version of art history for you to explore using Google Image Search.

It's no more 'true' than the official Modernist version, but it contains many more good paintings and is thereby more satisfying. There is no one true version of art history. When an intellectual mafia try to tell you otherwise, it's because they have a political agenda which they are crafting a story to support.

The only true judge of any art is your eye. To look at art through the lens of art criticism or the frame provided by exhibition organisers, with their selections and omissions, and carefully worded texts with their implicit baggage of disdain and prejudice, is to be misled. You are unwittingly co-opted into a world view you do not share.

You are impoverished by their choices.

Here is the only test you need apply to any art you see:

'Would I like to hang that on my wall?'

The Line of Beauty. And My Aching Backside.

Painting on location - not for wimps. A 'portable' easel weighs around five tons fully laden, and has more hard corners and sharp edges than a skip full of girders.

Nevertheless, I used it most days until lately. Just a fortnight ago today I trekked out to a painting spot and found out that you can, indeed, paint while it's raining. Just not very well. On the plus side, as a reward for sticking it out and braving the elements, I was treated to some magical evening sunlight, very dramatic clouds, and a double rainbow, and all of a sudden I was inside a George Inness painting. Still working on that in the studio.

I tend to carry my easel in one hand, rather than using the shoulder strap. Obviously, over time this will develop the strength in that arm in a disproportionate manner. I shall build one huge arm, so that I resemble a human fiddler crab. I'll wave it about at parties, in a threatening display. 'Behold my gianty arm! Behold!'

Anyway.

Still laid up with sciatica, quite possibly as a result of hefting that damned easel. The weather is fine, the fields are calling, and there are paintings I could begin. And I'm stuck at home nursing a sore butt. The moral of this tale? Standing in a draughty lane for an hour to draw a pretty orchard can have consequences.

On the plus side, it's given me time to read. I ordered 'The Art of Landscape Painting in Oil Colour ' by Sir Alfred East from Amazon about three weeks ago, but it's been taken hostage by brigands en route. The good news is I just got an email from Amazon's excellent customer service informing me that a new copy has been sent first class.

Update: it arrived this morning, and turned out to be a skinny pamphlet with 29 pages of closely printed text and no illustrations. Which is why I just removed the affiliate link ad.

Update #2: I found a free PDF download online of the whole book, here.

Note to self: Never, ever buy a book until you've Googled the title and added the words 'free PDF download' to it.

The Line of Beauty

I remembered this phrase when I looked at my reference shots of Hardwick park after I'd made a joiner out of them, and noted the S-shaped curves naturally occurring throughout, in the branches of the trees, and echoed in the layout of the land. I don't know who landscaped Hardwick park - perhaps it was Robert Smythson, the architect - but they knew what they were doing.

Looking the phrase up on Google took me to Wikipedia, and William Hogarth's 'The Analysis of Beauty': 'Prominent among his ideas of beauty was the theory of the Line of Beauty; an S-shaped curved line (serpentine line) that excited the attention of the viewer and evoked liveliness and movement.' Ready built in to the subject wherever you look - makes painting in the park a little like shooting fish in a barrel. I'm not going into Hogarth's ideas here, but the interested reader can follow the Wikipedia link above to find out more.

I downloaded 'The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds' too, which puts me firmly in my place on the second lowest rung as a painter of mere landscapes. On the other hand, this and the Hogarth are fascinating insights into eighteenth century opinion, which frankly seems both more thoughtful and entertaining than current art writing.

What do I think is beautiful? I know it when I see it, but giving any kind of pat definition is beyond me. I've mentioned how I pick my subjects - I wander around until I see something so visually affecting, in a positive way, that it makes me want to paint it. I'm always saying, 'Wow, that's pretty,' but I'm not sure pretty covers it.

Recognition is involved, somehow, but it's a slippery concept, and one that you can't reverse engineer. The component parts of beauty are separate from the things we find beautiful, and are within us.

How's that for a soundbite to hold the masses at bay while we quickly make our exit before some bright spark realizes we were just spouting nonsense? I'm not equipped for deep thought, being a bear of little brain, but I do know what's pretty, and that's good enough for me. I'll leave the theorizing to those who have nothing better to do.