Using Edge as an element in a painting

This month's project is on using edge as a visual element in a painting. Any visual approach is acceptable.
The easiest way to describe edge without going into too much technical detail I am going to pull from Kevin's book again. The book is "A Visual Palette."

"Edge is an effective tool for blending or separating contiguous shapes. Ad the boundary between shapes, an edge acts like a fence, which may be tall and intimidating or low and more accessible. Edges come in a variety of sharpness and softness. A sharp, bold edge works like a solid brick fence: it restrains the eye and confines it within a given shape. When an edge is completely annihilated, it allows the eye to freely access adjacent shape."

John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent handles edges beautifully. Two wonderful examples in this portrait of soft or lost edge can be seen in the way the shading on the man's right hand (on our left) blends into the inner sleeve of his jacket;

the other more obvious lost edge is his right trouser leg right below the knee where there is no discernible edge or line yet your eye does not lose its way and the leg is still there. The hard edges are beautiful here too with a wonderful flow of the figures stance giving us, the viewer an insight into the man's personality.

Orange: working on edges

Orange, 6x6, oil on board

My husband remarked upon seeing this little study that it was in the style of Rembrandt. I appreciate that he would say that; I think it is the black background that gives it that feel, but to be in the Rembrandt style was not intentional. This is a Cara Cara orange that seems to be plentiful this year in the stores here in Denver. I had bought a bag at Costco and found this one with the stem still on it in the bag. Not something you see very often on store bought oranges and I felt it helped with visual interest. I used this as a warm up to the next assignment that will be "edges." I tend to paint rather hard-edged and on this study I tried very hard to avoid that. I have the orange fading into the background on both sides and softened the edge on the bottom . I think it helps that I painted on raw wood. The paint tends to not flow that well. You must be very direct to get the paint to stick. Pardon my finger print in the upper left hand corner. OOPS.

In this piece I was painting with the limited palette that is attributed to Anders Zorn, a Swedish painter from the early 1900s. The palette uses Yellow Ocher as Yellow, Red Cad Light, black and white. Black is used as the blue primary color. I have been fascinated with the range you can get using these three colors. I was pleased with the orange I got even if it was not as bright as it would have been using one of the cadmium yellows. It was a fun little exercise.

Color as a Visual Approach in blue

Along the Adriatic, 24x24 oil on board

As I wrote last week, this project is Color as a Visual Approach. I chose an easy one to do in blues, since most of it already tended toward blue if it wasn't outright, like the sky and the sea. The only thing I really had to work at was the sand and the woman's face in the sunlight. It is reading as sand, but that sand actually has a lot of blue in it, making it a greenish color. See patch below and how green it looks on its own. BUT next to all the other blues, it still reads as sandy colored. Her face is basically the same pasty green but it reads as if it is in the light. This has been a good exercise for me. Even though the sand in the shadow has a lot of oranges and greens, the over color is blue if you squint down. That is the key. To use your whole palette and still keep the over color bluish.

Kevin critiqued this at the end of Monday's class. He likes it but said two things need to be done. The tire tracks on the right hand side are too soft and need a bit more graphic quality to them to match the overall graphic feel of the piece and to tie the shapes in the sand to the bicycle.

Color as a visual approach

This blog post is pulled mostly from Kevin Weckbach's book, "A Visual Palette." We are doing color this month and are now half way through. In the next post I will include my painting, which is in blues.

Picasso, blue period. Note that the blues are different.

Color as a visual approach promotes the theme of one color throughout a painting, in a way that emphasis's that color's unique range and diversity. For example, you take blue as your theme and create a visual statement based on an arrangement of various blues: bluish yellow (yes, it will look green), bluish grays, bluish blacks and pure blues. You might include cerulean blue, cobalt blue, thalo blue and or ultramarine blue. With each new blue, you define a new shape. This results in a painting that reads overall as blue, with an orchestration of seperate color statements lending depth and richness to the canvas.

Because of the diverse arrays of blues, this approach differs from that of color harmony., which typically unifies a painting's surface using one dominant color. In order to make color work as a visual approach, you will need to build it on a foundational value structure. A light and shadow or local tone can form as the underlying  framework for the color. When color dominates a painting's statement, the whole painting will first say blue to the viewer, before addressing the underlying visual structure, and it will do so not in one blue note but in a symphony of blues.

Quang Ho 20x20, Yellow Dancer

Above is a contemporary example of using the color yellow as a visual approach. Picasso's blue period is another good visual definition for examples of using blue.

Greenland Outbuildings-

Finishing Touches?

Here is the "finished" painting from light and shadow. I didn't think I had done that much to it since I originally posted it, but now I see I did more than I thought. I basically had the structure in and none of the details that pull it all together. So, a quick rundown. I sharpened the value contrasts by going darker on the roof of the central building and pulling out that roof line on the right and tying that dark into the roof of the buildings to the right of it. I also followed the cast shadow from the chimney on the roof to the horizon line to the left and connected it all together. I then added the light "snow" to the left edge of the roof line but left the darks to give the impression of holes. On the shadow side of the house I carved out just a few missing boards to give visual interest. On the front basically the same thing, except in the light. you can see that by going a few shades darker it carved out the trim board that had fallen from the roof line.
On the house to the left I added the flag pole and its cast shadow and a few other verticals, which give a repetition of verticals across the painting, especially with the addition of the grasses and the miner's candles. When putting the grasses in I was thinking about pattern and flow.
The last thing was to darken the snow in the lower left hand corner, which anchors the scene. 

I have been asked where these buildings are located. If you live in Colorado, this scene is off of 1-25 south, about half way between Denver and Colorado Springs. It is the Greenland exit and you go to the right when you exit heading to the Springs. There is a parking lot for hikers as there are buttes to the west. There is a working ranch as well as this "ghost" town of Greenland. Along with old abandoned houses, there is a corral that is of great visual interest. I meet a painter friend from the Springs here to plein air paint since it is halfway and there is plenty to paint.

Local Tone-A Walk in the Park-Winter

A Walk in the Park, oil on board, 24x18

Finally think this is finished, at least for now. I see a few picky things I might see to at some point in time, but overall I am satisfied. The light, medium and dark groups read well; the medium groups itself with the darks, so in that that, it is successful. The figure ties nicely into the background, yet gives good balance to the trees on the left. It looks cold and wintery.

Light and Shadow as a visual approach

What once was Greenland, CO, oil on linen, 20x30

We are done with this month's visual approach and I have yet to write a post on it. Light and Shadow is pretty self-explanatory; where there is light, there is a shadow. Simple, right? Not so much. This approach does use elements we have touched on previously, which makes it that much more challenging. How to incorporate them all into this visual approach? First think dark/light pattern. It is a good thing when starting a light and shadow painting to think of the large dark shape vs the light shape, what kind of pattern does it create? Then you must decide if you are going to tell the story in the light or in the shadow. One of them will dominate or have more detail and break down of shapes and color and the other will  be simplified. This is where you can spot a painter unclear of the concept and I made this error for a long time. ie Putting the same amount of detail in both the light and the shadow.

So, you lay out your composition with the dark/light pattern, then what? Add your middle value; There is a half-tone or the bridge between the light and the shadow. This is where Local Tone enters (remember, local tone has three values, light, medium and dark)The thing that keeps Light and Shadow separate from Local Tone is that local tone is flat; light and shadow has more form as you have the light source and highlights. When adding the light source you have to decide if the light is cool or warm. If it is a warm light on a sunny day, the shadows will be cool. If the light is cool, the shadows will be warm.You must also determine the direction of the light source; is it front lit, top lit, back lit, or lit from below or coming in at an angle. The light will hit the planes of the objects in a pattern and similar plane shifts will have similar values of light hitting them.

Kevin painted on my project because I wanted a demonstration of using gradation in my sky. Gradation is also an element of Light and Shadow. From right to left it was to be warm color moving to cool, and from light to dark; then from the top to bottom, dark to light and cool to warm. I can do one direction of the other but was not quite sure how to do both directions at once. I did give it a college try but was not satisfied with the results. His version of my sky, in the photo above is very gradual, and truthfully, I really only see the top down gradation and not so much the right to left. But be that as it may, it was helpful to me to see how he approached it.

I am still not finished with this painting and I missed the critique. There are lots of dried grasses coming through the snow that will add a nice contrast to the blue sky and snow, as well as give an overall warmth to the scene. As you can see, lots to think about when working with light and shadow, but it becomes second nature once you get all these things working together.