This is the fourth in a series of posts as I work through Mitchell Albala’s book Landscape Painting. The first three are site selection, format, and value.
In the early stages of learning to draw and paint, we’re told, “draw what you see”. At that stage it’s good advice, meaning “don’t just draw the symbol your brain uses for that object”. The problem is that at a slightly later stage in learning to paint, it’s awfully tempting to want to paint everything we see, including each and every one of the 200,000 leaves on that big tree there!
Of course, painting all the detail can’t be done. The trick is to simplify, to mass the values and colours into shapes that represent the major planes in the scene, and to find the degree of simplification that is the perfect balance between too much detail and not enough. But it’s difficult to know where to begin. Mitchell Albala says,
“Painting or drawing a shape is not difficult, but seeing a shape through layers of surface detail and complexity requires a practiced shift in perception”
The usual advice for seeing a simplified scene is to squint. Squinting reduces the amount of light entering the eye. With less light, the rods of the retina, which see light/dark, take over from the cones, which see mainly colour. Details disappear, similar values blend together, and basic shapes begin to appear. This blurred photo isn’t exactly the same as squinting, but it gives the idea. The details of the leaves, the waterlilies, etc. all disappear and bigger shapes of similar colour and value emerge.
Albala also suggests a series of three exercises to help see the planes in a scene, one of which is a four value sketch, similar to the digital image at the right. It has a similar effect, in that it forces you to make decisions that simplify a wide range of values into just four, helping to create the big shapes.
I discovered a great example of using squinting and value to simplify on George Perdue’s blog. As a bonus, the photo he used was taken at Scotsdale Farm, which is a lovely spot less than an hour away from here! I like his work; I’ll be spending quite a bit of time exploring his blog.
