DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2012/08/29

Playing with Color

Filed under: Color — Tags: , , , , — fred @ 01:15

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, grid of various color manipulations

The technological capture and reproduction of images dethroned the artist as magical image maker and robbed all pictures of their aura of rarity and preciousness, leaving us drawers and painters with the same status as those oddballs who insist on writing novels in longhand or doing all calculations with a slide rule.  On the other hand, analog and digital imaging technology is a most amazing box of educational toys for learning about aspects of perception and light.  I’ve had a long-running obsession to understand as much as I can about how these technologies work, from chemical color film to digital image processing, and studying and playing with these things has deeply informed the way I approach observational drawing and painting.  In this post I’ll share some samples of such play and how I learn from it.  I will try to make this both fun and informative – if I’m explaining stuff you already know, feel free to skim through.

As you probably recall from science class, Isaac Newton demonstrated that white light is a combination of all colors of light, and that the individual wavelengths of light appear to the eye as the different colors of the spectrum or rainbow.  Red is at the long-wavelength end of the spectrum, and as the wavelengths get shorter, the color transitions to orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue and violet.  Later experimenters discovered that a wide range of colors could be reproduced by combining just three colors of light, one representing the long (red) wavelengths, one the middle (green) wavelengths, and one the short (blue) wavelengths.  The illustration below represents the overlapping beams from spotlights of these three colors.  Where all three overlap, the light is white.  Where red and green overlap, we get yellow.  Blue and green make cyan (which you might call turquoise, aqua, or teal), and red and blue make magenta (or fuschia, reddish purple).  With red plus green, but more red than green, you have orange, and so on.  This kind of color process is called RGB, for the red, green and blue lights that are used.

Additive (RGB) Color Mixing, digital illustration by Fred Hatt

This way of making colors by combining three colors of light in varying ratios is called additive color mixing.  It’s the basis of color television, cathode ray tube screens, liquid crystal displays, video projectors, and the monitor on your smartphone.  Here’s a close-up of an LCD computer monitor.  A screen has thousands or millions of pixels (short for picture elements), and each pixel has a red, a green, and a blue element.  A digital picture is nothing but a series of numbers representing the brightness levels of each of the three colors for every one of these pixels in a grid.

LCD monitor, magnified to show red, green and blue pixel array, photo by Daniel Rutter

The photo below contains 305, 400 pixels, each one defined by levels of red, green and blue light specified by numbers from zero to sixty-four.  This is a small version – the original camera photo had over ten million pixels.

Photographic self-portrait, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt

With a digital picture it is easy to separate the three component colors as “channels”.  If we take just the levels for the red component of each pixel and render those as a monochrome image, we get the result below.  The skin looks light, almost luminous.  Taking a photo with black and white film through a red filter would give a very similar effect.  Most of the variations in skin tone are variations of redness, so when red is all you can see the differences are minimized.

Photographic self-portrait, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt, red channel

Doing the same with the green channel gives a pretty objective black-and-white rendering of the original photograph.  Because the green wavelengths are in the middle, or average, of the spectrum, they’re pretty close to the average lightness levels, without distortions in tone.  The red channel made me look youthful and glowing, but the green channel shows my age a bit more objectively.

Photographic self-portrait, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt, green channel

The blue channel is similar but the effect is even harsher.  The skin looks darker and blemishes and discolorations of the skin are more pronounced.  Some of the early black-and-white photography processes, including the film used for early silent movies, were sensitive only to the blue end of the spectrum, so they tended to render skin as dark and blotchy, necessitating the use of white make-up on the actors.

With this portrait photo, the red channel is strikingly different from the green and blue channels, which are more like each other.  If I had used a landscape photograph for the demonstration, the blue channel would be the one that stood out, with black foliage and a stark white sky, while the red and green channels would be more alike.

Photographic self-portrait, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt, blue channel

There’s another kind of color reproduction, called subtractive color mixing.  This is used in printing and in photographic prints or slides, where you start with a white ground (all wavelengths) and filter or absorb wavelengths selectively using dyes or pigments.  Transparent paint, such as watercolor, is essentially a subtractive color mixing technique.  The standard colors used in subtractive color processes are cyan (slightly greenish blue), magenta (purplish red) and yellow.  As you can see from the illustration below, mixing all three colors doesn’t give a perfect black, so a fourth layer of black ink is added in four color process printing.  This kind of color process is called CMYK, for cyan, magenta, yellow, and “key” (black).  Note that the subtractive process uses as its basic colors the same colors that are the combined colors in the additive process, and that the combined colors in the subtractive process (the overlapping areas below) are very similar to the basic colors in the additive process.

Subtractive (CMY) Color Mixing, digital illustration by Fred Hatt

Here’s an enlarged illustration of an image printed in a CMYK process.  Where the RGB process varies the brightness of the colored elements, the subtractive process varies the size of the colored dots.  In both types of image, you’re only seeing three colors, but they blend in the eye to create the illusion of a full range of colors.

Image printed in four-color process, with detail showing halftone dots

The image below is from “Butterflies and Flowers”, a performance by Claire Elizabeth Barratt and her Cilla Vee Life Arts company (with whom I have occasionally collaborated) at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx in 2004.  I chose this image to play with because it has such a range of vivid colors.

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt

To prepare this photo for color printing we would make “color separations“, the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black layers that would be successively superimposed to make the full color image.  Here is the cyan layer, followed by a version of the image with the other three layers (magenta, yellow, and black, without the cyan.  Notice how the red and yellow colors both look white in the cyan image, and how different the faces look in the different colors.

The subtractive process uses inks to absorb certain colors of light.  Cyan ink absorbs red light, and reflects blue and green light, so the cyan layer of the CMYK image is equivalent to the red channel of the RGB image, and shows a similar smoothing of skin tones.  The magenta layer in CMYK corresponds to the green channel in RGB, and yellow in CMYK corresponds to blue in RGB.

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, cyan channel

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, minus cyan channel

I’ll do the same thing with the other layers, showing each single-ink layer followed by the full image minus that color.  Here’s magenta and minus-magenta.

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, magenta channel

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, minus magenta channel

You’ll notice that the “minus one color versions” look like different types of faded images.  Old motion picture film often loses its cyan layer, giving a reddish image like the “minus cyan” example three images up.  Color inkjet prints that have been displayed in the sun often lose their magenta layer, leaving a greenish image like the one immediately above.  Next, yellow and minus-yellow:

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, yellow channel

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, minus yellow channel

The black layer of a CMYK print is like a very light black and white version of the image.  The lighter values will be distinguished by the colored inks, so the only place the black ink is needed is where the color mix doesn’t give enough contrast, in the darkest areas.

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, black channel

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, minus black channel

The CMY image without the black has the full range of colors but lacks contrast.  It lacks a full range of lightness or luminance.

Aside from additive (RGB) and subtractive (CMYK) processes, there’s another way of digitally specifying the values of pixels using a different combination of variables.  “Lab” color does not define color by the levels of light or pigment used to reproduce the color, though it still uses three dimensions.  “Lab” isn’t short for “laboratory” – L (lightness), a, and b are the names of those three dimensions. The three scales are actually based on the way human color perception works in the brain.

The human eye has three different kinds of cones, or color-sensitive receptors, but interestingly, the peak spectral sensitivities of the cones do not correspond to red, green, and blue, but to something more like yellow-orange, yellow-green and blue.  The visual cortex of the brain takes the input from these three sets of cones, and from the low-light sensitive rod cells, and, by comparing and contrasting, analyzes colors according to their variable positions on three scales: dark to light, reddish to greenish, and yellowish to bluish.  That’s the basis of the Lab color model.  It uses the numbers to define colors along these three polarities.  In practice, the Lab color model is mostly used as an intermediary, to translate between additive and subtractive modes, but it’s a fascinating system to explore because it is such a good simulation of how the human visual system processes color.

When we translate our experimental image into the Lab color space, we can selectively “flatten” the channels, showing the image with one variable removed.  Here’s the image with all variations in the lightness channel eliminated.  All the color differences are here, but without differences in dark and light.  It’s like the low-contrast CMY minus K version of the image (above), but instead of low-contrast, here we have absolutely no contrast in values, only in hue.

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, “L “channel flat

Now let’s restore the lightness channel to its full range and flatten the “a” (red/green) channel.  The resulting image  is very similar to simulations of the vision of people with complete red/green color-blindness.  Deuteranopia or Protanopia are the most common forms of color-blindness, and also similar to the way dogs and cats see color.  They have only two types of color-sensitive cones, so they can distinguish blue colors, but red and green colors all look more or less the same.  Note that the red flowers here completely blend in with the green foliage background.  There is speculation that the ability to distinguish red from green was evolutionarily advantageous because it helped locate fruit!

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, “a” channel flat

If we flatten the “b” (yellow/blue) channel, we can see the contrast between reds and greens but not between yellows and blues.  Tritanopia, another, very rare, form of color-blindness, looks like this (below).  For the person with normal color perception, the version below showing red/green distinctions is probably more pleasing than the version above that shows yellow-blue distinctions.  The lightness scale can often stand in for the yellow/blue scale because we see yellow as light and blue as dark.  The red/green scale is more equal in terms of values, but it is better at separating animals (usually reddish) from plants (usually greenish).  The yellow/blue scale can be seen as separating land (yellowish) from sky and water (bluish).

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, “b” channel flat

In looking at the colors of subjects I am drawing or painting, I often try to understand them according to the Lab scales.  Lightness/darkness is by far the most important scale to define form.  Seeing colors on the relative “a/b” scales, as bluish vs yellowish and reddish vs greenish, is simple and clarifying.  This model helps in observing subtle differences within color areas and help an artist avoid the “flatness” that often results when painters think of colors as duplicating surface colors of objects, rather than relative qualities of light.

Let’s try some other variations on this image, just for fun.  Here is an “inverted” version of the full color image, essentially a color negative.  Light becomes dark and dark light.  Every color becomes its complement: blue becomes yellow and red becomes green.

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, all RGB channels inverted

Here’s a version with the Lab lightness channel inverted, and the “a” and “b” channels not inverted.  Here the lights and darks are switched, but the hues of things remain the same as they are in the original image.

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, “L” channel inverted

We can restore the L (lightness) channel to its correct orientation and instead invert the color channels.  Here’s a version with the “a” (red/green) channel reversed.  The dancers are green and the foliage is brown.

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, “a” channel inverted

Here’s the “b” (yellow/blue) channel reversed.  This makes the dancers’ skin look rather purple, and the foliage becomes blue.  I find both of these variations psychedelically beautiful.

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, “b” channel inverted

Finally, the image with both “a” and “b” channels inverted.  In essence, this converts all hues to complementary hues while leaving values unchanged.

“Butterflies & Flowers”, performance by Cilla Vee, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, both “a” and “b” channels inverted

Let’s go back to the photographic self portrait and do some other digital manipulations on it.  Here I have increased the contrast to separate only the brightest highlights of the image.

Photographic self-portrait, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt, brightest highlights only

And next, I’ve increased the contrast to bring out only the darkest parts of the image.

Photographic self-portrait, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt, darkest darks only

Here I have combined the darks and the brights against a mid-toned background.  This is essentially how I’m looking at my subject when I’m drawing with lights and darks on gray paper.  The paper provides a mid-tone, and I draw highlights with white and shadows with black, getting a wide range of values much more quickly than would be possible by drawing with only darks on a white paper.

Photographic self-portrait, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt, highlights, darks and midtone

As I often do in drawing, here I’ve superimposed the colors over the simplified black/gray/white values to make a color portrait.  As in the “Lab” model, the face is a little reddish, a little yellowish.  Some of the background colors are a little bluish or greenish.  Seeing color according to just three polarities simplifies it for the purposes of time-limited drawing.  What I have done here with a digital deconstruction of a photograph is very similar to what I do mentally during the process of observational drawing or painting.

Photographic self-portrait, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt, highlights, darks and midtone with color

 

2012/08/16

Visages

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Portraits — Tags: , , , , , , , — fred @ 23:01

Edwin (profile), 2012, by Fred Hatt

To draw a face by observation, I start out by touching.  Of course I can’t literally touch, so I watch how the light strikes the prominences, falls into the hollows, and flows across the flats, furrows, and swells.  My brush strokes the paper just as though it is stroking the model’s face, following in the path of the light.

This post is a series of my recent portrait drawings.  The first three are relatively quick sketches, twenty minutes of rough freehand rendering using this tactile approach with mostly white gouache and black watercolor.

Tanya (blue), 2012, by Fred Hatt

If you are old enough, you may remember the old Polaroid instant photos, the kind that would eject from the camera in a state of blankness, and then, as you watched, an indistinct image would appear and gradually sharpen, like the world coming back into the vision of someone awakening from a swoon.  This kind of drawing emerges that way, clarifying in stages.  If I keep on going over and over it with the darks and the lights, eventually it starts looking rather continuous-toned and realistic.  But twenty minutes is just a short enough time that the tactile quality still shows nicely in the strokes.

Tin (profile), 2012, by Fred Hatt

The next three drawings are nude portraits from the long pose sessions I run at Spring Studio.  These are done with a combination   of aquarelle crayons, watercolor and gouache, and the total drawing time for each is about two hours, or six times as long as the sketches above.

Crolie, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Even with the longer drawing time, I don’t want the images to become too smooth.  In the past, I used to make them smoother, but I think they’re more interesting when you can see the gesture in them, so when they get to a certain level of pictorial development, I switch from blending the gradients to sharpening the geometry and indicating subtle perceptions using bold gestures.

Crolie (detail), 2012, by Fred Hatt

In my nude portraits, I’m trying to integrate the face and the body.  Culturally, the portrait and the figure are separate artistic genres, but I like to merge them, to show the face as part of the body.  An actor will tell you that a character resides as much in the body, in energy and movement and posture, as it does in the face.  An artist’s model projects his essence with all of it together.

Julio, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Julio (detail), 2012, by Fred Hatt

Touching the model is not allowed, and usually in these open sessions there is not much opportunity to talk with the model either.  But I want my drawing to convey to the viewer that they could touch this person in the drawing, that they have an idea of her personality and her way of being in the world, that she could speak to them and they could come to know her.  I have to try to communicate all that just by looking and drawing.  It needs a wide open kind of looking, and the maximum possible energy channeled into the drawing.

Robyn, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Robyn (detail), 2012, by Fred Hatt

I will conclude with drawings I made of the one-year-old fraternal twin daughters of some close friends of mine.  I prefer to draw portraits directly from life, and nearly all the drawings I have published in this blog are done that way, but it’s hard to get babies to sit still enough for anything other than a very rough sketch, so I did refer to photographs in making these.  I wanted to try to capture the distinctive personalities and looks of these twin sisters.  Babies haven’t had time to develop some of the hard features and cultivated attitudes that individualize adults, but they are all born different, and their particularity is absolutely authentic.

Anya, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Katya, 2012, by Fred Hatt

All the drawings in this post are done on gray Canson paper, mostly with a combination of aquarelle crayons, watercolor, and white gouache.  They are 18″ x 24″ (41 x 61 cm) except for the baby portraits, which are 12″ x 18″ (30.5 x 41 cm).

2012/07/27

Cut to the Quick

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Quick Poses — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — fred @ 19:32

Julio Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

As the 2012 Olympic Games get underway in London, we’ll have an opportunity to observe the elegance and power of the human body in action, diverse kinds of bodies honed through intensive training for different skills.  Here I salute the occasion with my own studies of the body from figure drawing sessions at Figureworks Gallery in Brooklyn and Spring Studio in Manhattan.   All of these sketches are made with watercolor and brush during sequences of two-minute poses.  The illustrations are presented in random order, and the interspersed text is not specifically related to the adjacent images, but generally to the whole collection.

Alley Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

A sequence of quick poses is a kind of dance, as the model moves from one position to another to reveal the anatomical structure and the expressive range of the body.  The artist has only a moment to capture whatever can be captured.  I am fascinated by the variety and dynamism of quick poses – the models can do all sorts of things that would be impossible or painful to hold for even a five or ten minute pose.  Knowing that the timer is relentlessly counting down, I enter into a mode of hyperfocused flow, my eyes and my brush both in constant and coordinated motion.  The only way to get anything interesting is to work with swift efficiency.

Gwen Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Here I’m posting complete sequences, so you’ll see some awkward passages as well as some lovely bits of brushwork that reveal something true of the model’s aliveness or individuality.  Every real brushstroke is a rough approximation of the ideal brushstroke into which the visual cortex is translating the forms it perceives.  I’ve been practicing this for many years, so my approximations are pretty good when my focus is on.  It’s more important that the lines be confident and expressive than that they be accurate.  If I were to stop to measure or take a moment to step back and look critically at the sketch, I would hardly be able to get anything at all in two minutes.  I have to go unhesitatingly with the flow, and trust the flow.

Pedro Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I look for curves – the curve of the spine, of the hip, of the neck, of the knee, and make each curve a stroke of the brush.  I try to emphasize what makes each individual body unique, not to genericize the anatomy.  That uniqueness is in the curves.  The curve of one person’s hip is quite different from that of another’s hip.  I always look for the physical idiosyncracies.

Crolie Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I generally omit or radically simplify faces, hair, hands and feet.  Those parts of the body are detail traps, best saved for more leisurely studies.  But they are also often key to the particular expression of a pose or model, so I try to get some indication of their angles.  The direction of a gaze, the splay or curl of the fingers, the twist of an instep can be the detail that makes the pose come alive in the sketch.  For me, angles and curves are practically the whole of quick drawing.

Eric Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Quick poses are a special exchange of energy between model and artist.  A set of quick poses gives the model an opportunity to perform, to stretch out, to test their limits, to offer contrasts of feeling or form.  As the artist, I cannot let such a gift go unappreciated.  When a model is really giving the energy, drawing is like dancing with a fantastically graceful or dynamic partner – complete abandon is the only appropriate response.

Claudia Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

A kind of time dilation can occur during quick poses.  From my own experience as a model, I can tell you that holding a challenging pose can make two minutes seem like an eon.  For the artist, a pose that’s complicated to draw can make two minutes feel like a few seconds.

James Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Observing angles is a quick way to see how one thing relates to another thing in space.  When I’m doing quick sketches, I’m making lots of lines that I don’t draw.  In my mind, I make lines between points to see how they relate in space.  I check the angle going from nipple to nose, or from fold of elbow to bulge of heel, or from where the arm meets the leg to the pubic ridge.  When all of those parts are in the right angular relations to each other in space, proportions will be a fair approximation of the reality.

Robyn Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Sometimes it’s easier to see curves and shapes and angles by looking at the negative spaces, the places where the body is not, and how those places relate to each other.  Or the angles of the body may become clearer by seeing them in relation to straight lines such as a wall or surface, the pole the model holds or the wall on which he leans.

Adam Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I’ve pored over anatomy books, assimilating as much structural understanding of the body as I can, but I depict only details I can see.  The knowledge helps me to grasp these features of the body, but I can’t get lost in an analytical breakdown of the body.  I try to get as many anatomical details into the sketches as I can, because these details individualize the body.

Tin Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Curves and angles, negative spaces, spatial relationships, anatomical details, flow and rhythm – it’s a lot to see and a lot to try to depict in two minutes.  The only way to do it is to merge perceiving and drawing into a unified process.  This is achieved by trying and trying and refining through hundreds of hours of practice.

When you watch an Olympic gymnast, you are seeing someone who has developed a perfect unity of perception and action through relentless practice.  Drawing is more subjective, but the learning process is similar.  All the details have to come together, to become one act.

Claire Quick Poses, 2012, by Fred Hatt

All of the original sketches in this post are made with watercolor and a brush in 18″ x 24″ sketchbooks.  Multiple pages have been stacked vertically in the illustrations so a whole series of quick poses appear in a single image, as though the drawings were made on a scroll.  Action sketches actually made on scrolls, drawn by me more than a decade ago, can be seen in this post.  I have also written previously about the similarities between life drawing practice and athletic practice, here.

 

2012/07/04

Different Strokes

Filed under: Art History,Collections of Images,Top Ten — Tags: , , , , , , , , — fred @ 00:38

Porcupine, 1951, woodcut by Leonard Baskin

 

The magic of drawing or printmaking is in the strokes.  By strokes I mean the particular and idiosyncratic quality of the lines or other marks the artist makes.  Some lines jab while others meander.  Some markings are cloudy while others are crisp.  The strokes convey in a tactile way the essence of how the artist comes to grips with the challenge of capturing a thing seen or actualizing an inner vision.  Making a drawing is a journey of exploration, and these markings are the spoor of the trek.  When we look at a drawing, we can feel the energy that went into it in the particular flavor of its lineaments.

In this post I present a goodly selection of mostly monochrome sketches and prints by a wide diversity of masterly mark-makers.  I’ll let the works speak for themselves and leave it to you to contemplate the contrasts among them.  I have generally chosen pieces with a direct, spontaneous quality, avoiding highly finished styles where the quality of line may be more a matter of design than of the energy of the mind and the hand.  I often tried to find unfamiliar examples of the work of well-known artists, and sometimes individual works that are not representative of the artists’ familiar styles.  I think you’ll be particularly surprised by the early De Kooning sketch!

Man Walking in a Field, 1883, conte crayon drawing by Georges Seurat

 

Portrait, title, date and medium unknown, by Paul Cadmus

 

Composition, 1916, medium unknown, by Wassily Kandinsky

 

Edward Scissorhands, 1990, pen and pencil drawing by Tim Burton

 

Autumn, 1970, engraving by Salvador Dalí

 

Self Portrait, 1946, by David Alfaro Siqueiros

 

Musician portrait, date, title, and medium unknown, by Edgar Degas

 

Drawings, 1939, title and medium unknown, by Jackson Pollock

 

Saturn, 1516, engraving(?) by Hans Baldung Grien

 

Resting Woman Wearing Tiara, 1936, pen and ink drawing by Henri Matisse

 

Sketchbook pages, date unknown, drawings by R. Crumb

 

Reproduction Drawing III (after the Leonardo cartoon), 2010, media unknown, by Jenny Saville

 

Self Portrait at the Age of Eighty-Three, 1843, ink brush drawing by Hokusai

 

Untitled, 1981, drawing by Jean-Michel Basquiat

 

Study for the Head of Leda, 1506, ink and chalk drawing by Leonardo da Vinci

 

Gregory Hines, date and medium unknown, sketch by Jules Feiffer

 

Study of the Head of Elizabeth Siddal for “Ophelia”, 1852, medium unknown, by John Everett Millais

 

Femme nue couchée, 1932, charcoal drawing by Pablo Picasso

 

Old Man on a Swing, 1826, medium unknown, by Francisco Goya

 

Untitled, 1950, ink drawing on parchment by Philip Guston

 

Europa, 1953, lithograph by Hans Erni

 

Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, 1514, by Albrecht Dürer

 

Love Forever (TAOW), 2004, marker drawing on canvas by Yayoi Kusama

 

Bird Personage, date and medium unknown, by Remedios Varo

 

Court Room Scene, date and medium unknown, by Honoré Daumier

 

Beekeepers, 1568, etching(?) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

 

Drawings, dates, titles and media unknown, by Alberto Giacometti

 

Self Portrait, date and medium unknown, by Henry Fuseli

 

Tree with Trunk, 1998, etching by Louise Bourgeois

 

Drawing, 1944, title and medium unknown, by Pavel Tchelitchew

 

Nude Study, 1908, etching by Georges Braque

 

The Sower, 1888, pencil and pen and ink drawing by Vincent van Gogh

 

Portrait of Elaine De Kooning, 1940, pencil drawing by Willem De Kooning

 

Some Can Fly and Some Can’t, 1939, medium unknown, by Rico Lebrun

 

Le Chapeau-Main, 1947, lithograph by Hans Bellmer

 

Sketch for “Apollo Slays Python”, 1850, medium unknown, drawing by Eugène Delacroix

 

Madame Louis-Francois Godinot, 1829, medium unknown, drawing by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, with detail

 

Corps de Dame, 1950, medium unknown, by Jean Dubuffet

 

Cape Lion, 1650, medium unknown, drawing by Rembrandt van Rijn

 

The Man who Taught Blake Painting in his Dreams, 1820, print(?) by William Blake

 

Five Swearing, 1912, oil sketch by Ferdinand Hodler

 

Madame Sohn, 1918, charcoal sketch by Egon Schiele

 

Seated Bodhidharma, 18th century, ink brush drawing by Suio Genro

 

All the images used in this post were found on the web, and clicking on an image will take you to the page where I found it.  Any information about the artwork that is listed as “unknown” is information I was not able to find at the time of making the post.  If you can provide additional or corrected information I will incorporate it.

Readers are invited to nominate some of their favorite drawings for an eventual sequel to this post!

2012/05/13

Back in Gray

Filed under: Figure Drawing: Process,Figure Drawing: Watercolor — Tags: , , , , , , , , — fred @ 23:25

Leaning Ahead, 2012, by Fred Hatt

For any artist, I think, regularity of work is essential.  For an artist like me who does other work to make a living, it can be very difficult to keep the creative practice vital and central.  I hold my life drawing practice as a constant.  Sometimes in my life I’m working on special creative projects, and sometimes I’m not.  Sometimes I’m spending huge amounts of time doing jobs to pay the bills, or dealing with family responsibilities, or whatever.  No matter what, I get to my life drawing sessions faithfully.  There are two three-hour classes I attend nearly every week, one a long pose class and another one featuring shorter poses.  I may miss the occasional session due to work schedule, travel, or other unavoidable disruptions, but I will not miss a session because I’m tired or not in the mood or not feeling confident.  The structure of the session solves all my potential “blocks”.  The model gives me a focus that takes me out of my own head.  The model is an active stimulus to which I can respond, without having to come up with any ideas.  The timed poses give me a sense of urgency – there is never quite enough time, so I have to get right into it, no dithering.  The critical eye can only be indulged fleetingly – it can’t be allowed to take over from the direct action of drawing.

I don’t allow the practice to become just a hobby, doing the same things over and over again because they please me.  It must be a constant struggle, a quest to see more, understand more, capture more.  There is no end to the study.  There is always something new I can understand about the structure or the expressiveness of the body, something new I can learn about light or about how eye and mind interact, some new bit of technique or material I can explore, some new challenge of spontaneity or carefulness that I can undertake as I draw.

Last year I had begun to feel that I was getting a bit too comfortable in my technique of drawing with aquarelle crayons on gray or black paper, and I decided to start working with watercolors at my life drawing sessions.  If you have been following Drawing Life over the last several months you’ve seen my struggles with the unforgiving medium.  In recent weeks I’ve been trying different papers, including gray paper, and returning sometimes to crayons or using the crayons in conjunction with the paints.  In this post I’ll share some of that work.  All of these pieces were made in the past month.  If you’re not a painter the discussion may be a bit technical, so feel free to just enjoy the pictures.

Knee L, 2012, by Fred Hatt

The wet brush makes more expressive strokes than dry media.  In part this is because it is less controllable, or to be more precise it is controlled more by physics and less by the artist’s hand.  An oil painter may use as much underdrawing and overpainting as necessary to master the painted image, but watercolors are transparent, so all the work shows through.  The unruly nature of the brush is understood in East Asian calligraphy as a virtue.  To make a spontaneous stroke that conveys energy, movement and feeling, using a big floppy wet brush, is a taoist exercise par excellence – going with the flow, dancing on the wind, trusting the chaos of nature to impart its ineffable beauty to your human gesture.

Iridescence of Skin, 2012, by Fred Hatt

The sketches above and below are done with the aquarelle crayons I’ve used for so much of my work over the years.  The crayons have several special qualities.  They can easily be used either sideways, to smear out areas of color, or on point, to make lines.  Hues can be blended by layering on the paper, without mixing and muddying the pigments, perfect for an additive approach to color.  On dark paper, the lighter crayons have a special luminosity, effectively rendering subtle effects of light.  I like to draw by looking at light before anything else, and usually this means drawing highlights before shadows and edges of things – an approach that is impossible when using transparent paints on a white ground.

Touch of Light, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Recently I’ve been using white gouache (opaque watercolor) combined with transparent colors on gray paper, trying for those glowing highlights.  At this point I’m not good enough with the paint to get anything like the color complexity I can get with the crayons.  The crayon drawing above and the gouache/watercolor sketch below are both twenty-minute studies.  With paint, it takes longer to get the light and dark, so there’s less time for color, and since the white gouache is the only paint lighter than the gray background, color in the highlights is a two-stage process, not a one-stage process as with the crayons.

Torso, 2012, by Fred Hatt

The long-pose class gives a longer time to work at subtleties of color and tone.  It’s a three-hour class, and when the warm-up poses and the breaks are subtracted, there’s about two solid hours of studying a single pose.

Akimbo, 2012, by Fred Hatt

The long pose studies above and below are painted in watercolor on white bristol vellum, with some white gouache used for highlight detailing and corrections.  The white gouache never cleanly covers anything.  Any color that is underneath bleeds into it, and it can quickly become dull and dirty-looking.  I’m still trying to use my additive color approach, not mixing paints on the palette, but using straight colors in proximity to each other, so they mix in the eye to give the impression of smooth transitions.  It’s very hard to get this to work as well as it does with the crayons.  The crayons can be applied lightly on the side, introducing a subtle tone to an area.  My best approximation of that with the paint is to use a fan brush with a rather dry load of paint to put down some thin subtle lines of color.  Wherever the white paper shows through, though, it dominates, as it is obviously the brightest and strongest color of them all.

Inward Look, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I finally found a kind of gray paper that takes the watercolor and gouache paints well, without too much friction and without sucking all the water out of the brush or puckering at the wetness.  As you can see in the long-pose example below, this allows me to use white as a highlight, so I can work with paint both lighter and darker than the ground, but it doesn’t do much to make the color mixing easier.  In the background of this one, I’ve used crayons on edge to get soft area coloration, but the colors in the figure are all paint.

Reader of Proust, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Below is a crayon drawing on black paper, 20-minute pose.  Working on black paper offers its own special challenges – as with white paper, I can only go in one direction with the values.  But I think in twenty minutes with crayons I’ve been able to get as much color variance as I was able to do in six times the time in those long pose studies with paint.

Side and Back, 2012, by Fred Hatt

The next three pictures are all 20-minute foreshortened reclining poses.  The first one is done with watercolor and gouache, on a medium gray paper that works well with the crayons.  With the paint, it’s resistant.  The paint doesn’t flow smoothly on this paper, and you may be able to see the scratchy quality of the brushstrokes.  But the middle gray is perfect for bringing out the bold contrast between the black and white paint, and the vividness of the colors against the neutral ground.

Head End Reclining Figure, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Below is a similar pose, painted on the lighter gray paper that handles the wet media more smoothly.  Here I was able to abstract the strokes in a more deliberate way, especially in the face.

Dune, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I used the same paper for the one below.  I used a red crayon to sketch out the figure, then used white gouache and black watercolor to render highlights, edges, and shadows in a relatively realistic style.  The odd angle nevertheless gives this figure a mildly cubist aspect.

Sleeping Weightlifter, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Portraits are the most challenging mode of all, and I’ll conclude this post with four paintings of faces.  The first one is a quick watercolor sketch on bristol vellum, with rough, brushy color.

Knee Kiss, 2012, by Fred Hatt

This one’s on the brush-resistant medium gray paper.  I love the way the gouache-painted highlights look on this darker ground.  The paint becomes light itself.

Heavenward, 2012, by Fred Hatt

These last two are both painted on the lighter gray paper (though the photographs make the background color look quite different.  It’s a little too warm in the first one and definitely too cool in the second one).  I have to say I’ve always loved working on gray paper.  I can paint the highlights and the shadows, and let the paper provide the tones in between.

Mike in Profile, 2012, by Fred Hatt

The neutrality of the gray ground also has the effect of calming the mind.  For the purposes of drawing, it is a perfect nothingness.  White shines all over and all you can do is try to knock it down a bit.  Black always stays in the background, making anything that  is lighter than itself glow, but its main quality is to suck up and extinguish as much light as it can.  Gray is the synthesis of black and white.  It is serene and unassertive.  It glows, but gently.  It absorbs, but just a bit.  Gray contains all the colors, dark and light, somber and wild, in balance.  Put a red next to it, and you will see the coolness of the gray.  Put a blue next to it, and evoke gray’s warmth.  Gray possesses the underappreciated magic of moderation!

Alley, 2012, 2012, by Fred Hatt

Sizes of the works shown in this post are as follows:

On white paper:  19″ x 24″ (48.3 x 61 cm)

On black paper:  27.5″ x 19.75″ (50 x 70 cm)

On medium gray paper:  18.5″ x 24.5″ (47 x 62 cm)

On light gray paper:  18″ x 24″ (46 x 60 cm)

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