Ideas Made of Light

Posts Tagged ‘lighting’

#39: Flights of Fancy by James Gurney

Before I say anything else, if you’re an artist you should go buy both of James Gurney’s books about painting. If you like the approach this blog takes to analyzing paintings, you’ll love Gurney’s approach in these books. The one this painting is from is Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter, and his first one is Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist. (As a former technical writer I also like the presentation – each topic is a 2-page spread with a summary up-front, clear text, and a number of illustrations.) OK, plug over, but they’ve both helped me out tremendously.

This analysis is all about contrast. Not just contrast between values, but all sorts of contrast. If you want to create a focus – an area of interest – you need to set up some sort of pattern and then selectively break it. The contrast between the rest of the pattern and the special part draws the attention. That contrast can be values, but in this painting we’ll also look at contrast in lines of direction, saturation, and hue. In his book, Gurney uses this painting to illustrate several points about lighting conditions at dawn or dusk. The first thing that jumped out at me, though, was contrast in the direction of the edges.

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#28: The Men’s Bathhouse, by Albrecht Dürer

Last week I said that this time I’d write about something old. I hope 1498 qualifies. Thanks to a timely birthday present from my brother, I’m doing a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, a German painter and engraver best known at the time for his highly skilled prints. At Illuxcon a couple of years ago I saw some fantastic ink work by Ian Miller, like Trees and Insects. He was kind enough to do a portfolio review for me, and during the process recommended that I start with Dürer. So, here we are.

I chose The Men’s Bath because we can clearly see the techniques Dürer used in the linework. This in a medium in which the artist and craftsmen who then cut the blocks had to be aware of and consider every line, every mark. We’ll look at examples of how Dürer handled form of the body, textures like wood and stone, and background elements like buildings and trees. He used hatching, feathering, and cross-hatching to establish values in what is basically a black and white medium. While that medium may be woodcut, the principles apply equally well to inking with brush and pen today.

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#25: Relativity by M. C. Escher

Man, I love M. C. Escher’s stuff! I know I’m hardly alone in that, but I thought I’d get it out of the way right in the beginning. And Relativity is one of my favorites. A few years back the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC had a showing of Escher’s work. Something that really caught me by surprise was how much you could see on the actual pieces that doesn’t show up even in the good quality, coffee table books of Escher’s work. Sure, he’s known for the perspective tricks, tessellation, and space warping, but he’s also a darn good artist and draftsman. I love Relativity because of the wonder and imagination, but it’s also a great example of things like lighting and defining mass and form. We’ll look at all of these things in this analysis.

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#21: Welcome to Lovecraft #2, by Gabriel Rodríguez

It doesn’t happen often that I buy a comic based on the strength of a cover, but Locke & Key is an example of a comic that I knew nothing about before I saw it on the shelves of my local shop. I picked it up and flipped through it on the strength of this cover. I thought it looked interesting, but put it back on the shelf. A few weeks later, though, I noticed another cover that was just surreal and slightly disturbing without being overtly horror. Just my cup of tea. I picked it up again and saw that the guy crawling out of someone’s head was literal, not just metaphor. I’ve been reading it since. I decided to do this cover because it was the first one that did the job of making me notice the series.

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#19: I Have Been Reserved for This, by Howard Pyle

This illustration is for a story in McClure’s magazine in 1906 called “The Hanging of Mary Dyer.” There was an actual Mary Dyer who was an early Quaker martyr. She was executed for repeatedly returning to Massachusetts to preach Quakerism after having been banned from the colony. Pyle himself was Quaker, so the illustrations for this story likely had an extra dimension for him. Also, though it may not be apparent from the picture, this is the very act that led to Mary Dyer’s execution, so it’s a key moment of the story.

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#18: Hymn, by Yigit Koroglu

Yigit Koroglu, an artist from Turkey, posted this painting just a few weeks ago. (Click here for a larger version.) I’d been planning to pick something from his gallery when he posted it, and one of the first things I noticed was the way he’d used textures to really sell the realism on a fundamentally bizarre creature. There’s also nice stuff going on with depth and composition, so I’ll touch on all of that in looking at how this picture works.

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#4: Couple Descending Staircase, by J.C. Leyendecker

J. C. Leyendecker is one of the key players in modern advertising, though few have heard his name. Working with Cluett, Peabody, and Company (the makers of Arrow collars), Leyendecker proposed not just one ad, but an entire campaign. He helped them work out the look and feel of the “Arrow man” and demonstrated the power of branding. This image is one of the Arrow collar ads, and it shows an emphasis not on the shirt or collar itself, but instead on an ideal. The ideal is that of the upper-class American man, at the same time masculine and refined.

Ideals are abstract, though. Let’s look at how he constructs this image to communicate that ideal.

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