Sky holes 3

I want to show you a couple of great tree painters so that you can look at the restrained and simplified way each of them approached the sky hole problem. The painting above is by John Constable, courtesy of the artrenewal.org. Look at how "big" he kept the shapes in those trees. The sky holes are kept to a minimum and the large forms are dominant over them.When you see it done, it seems no big deal, but when you are confronted in nature by a tree with dozens of holes in it, some hard decisions have to be made.

The next painting is a Corot, look how few sky holes he used, just a handful, and they are carefully placed to both look random and to reveal the shape of the tree. Notice how airy those trees are, their wispy handling makes them look ephemeral. Their beauty is in their delicacy.

Here is more delicacy., this John Carlson is full of soft passages and artfully arranged shapes. The top third of this painting is an arrangement of unique and interesting shapes. These were designed carefully to be both random looking and to carry a concealed rhythmic geometry. Notice how differently each of these painters has handled the similar problems in their paintings.

Sky holes 2

OK, listen up tonight, because this is crucial. Of all the things I can tell you about drawing trees, this is one of the most important. It is also one of the least used and understood principles in landscape painting. It is called diffraction. Because the light coming through a sky hole is passing through a reduced aperture, it is less bright than the sky itself. If you like, think of the tree as "robbing" light from the sky holes.

YOU HAVE TO PAINT SKY HOLES DARKER THAN THE SKY, OTHERWISE THEY WILL JUMP OUT, RATHER THAN HOLD THEIR PLACE IN THE TREE.

In the image above, I have cheated the sky holes up to the value of the lightest parts of the sky. The sky holes become lights hung in the tree.This it what you get without diffraction. Below is the version with diffraction........

I have photoshopped the image so that the sky holes are darker than the sky around the tree. I stuck a square of the value I used to do that, over on the right of the tree. It is not just a little darker than the sky, it is a lot darker than the sky! If you will compare the two versions, the lower one hangs together far better than the upper one. The photograph does record some diffraction, but I have characterized it , shown that I know about it. In this instance, more diffraction works better than what the camera captured. Our job as artists is often to make things look better than the uncritical all seeing lens of the camera.

Skyholes part 1

This grand old tree stands by a roadside here in New Hampshire. It is composed visually of several layers. You have probably seen an opera set or a ballet stage that has flats, or layers of scenery receding back into the space of the stage. Imagine that tree above the same way. The nearest flat, would be the leaves in the light, behind them the next layer is the shadowed interior of the tree, the third layer is the branches, and the fourth layer is the sky behind the tree. I want to spend a little time in some upcoming posts on each of those layers. The first layer I want to address is the skyholes, the patches of sky that appear through the tree within its outline.

I have drawn some lines within the interior of this tree to haul those random holes together into a rhythmic order. If you just scatter those holes about they will look too assertive and each one standing on its own will call for the viewers sole attention. Thereforeit is better if they are related to one another, a constellation of sky holes rather than the machine gunned look. Notice how those lines all have an arching similarity. If the sky holes are influenced by an invisible geometric structure suggested beneath them, they will be simpler and more effective. The idea here is like yesterdays manner of finding order in a grouping of trees, but today we are trying to find order within the tree itself. The lines above represent not the tree itself but the general flow of the skyholes seen through the limbs. I will be back on sky holes tomorrow.

Hidden bounding lines for drawing the forms of trees

I am going to begin to move on to actually painting these trees we have been dissecting. I use the word dissecting because what I have been writing about is tree anatomy. In the comments we have discussed a book written in the early 20th century by an artist named Rex Vicat Cole called "The Artistic Anatomy of Trees". I learned a lot there, if there were a bibliography for this series of posts, Cole would be at the top. It is not easily read though and goes into a lot of detail that is extraneous.

Here is a grouping of trees that we might set up to paint. Below is the same group of trees with the general lines indicated.

In order to get this scene onto my canvas I would draw their outlines something like this. There are about five big shapes there. One of the reasons this scene is attractive is because each of those areas is a different size and shape. As the artist trying to get the picture up and running I need to plan out the simplest "blueprint" of my shapes I can. Now,I drew these lines on the picture with photoshop, which is for me a pretty clumsy affair. If I were working in paint on canvas the lines would be softer. Theses lines look a little like coat hangers, but I think you get the idea. This is a summary, here's another.

Above is the scene and below are the summary lines that would start a block in of the painting. These lines are merely the greatest simplification of where the landscape is and carry the least amount of detail. The details of the edges of the forms are averaged or rounded off. However if you can get this much information onto your canvas you are well on your way to "taming" a scene like this.

Below is the same photo with a few more lines on it. They show the larger " hidden" lines in the forms. You want to look for these and lightly indicate them.

Notice the relationship between 1 and 2, by finding that line between the two and checking its angle you find a lot about about their placement. Look at line 3, see what happens if you imagine it running behind that central group of trees and emerging on the other side. Notice where it would intersect that foreground diagonal were that extended. These continuation of existing lines show relationships between different objects in the scene. Look for them. It is a helpful way to avoid working piecemeal, which is where you have everything on the canvas, but not in its right relationship to everything else. This is a geometric measuring system.