Perspective - Creating Depth

Painting. It's like no day passed in school without us having to paint :) I really enjoy doing it though, especially with weird pigment binders like honey, yogurt and corn starch.
But we didn't just smear our papers with food, we actually started to look into perspective, get paintings to have depth and how to create our own set of colours. I will focus today on the "depth"-section since I need to revise the whole pigment, binder coating and dissolver - thing.
Here we go:

One of the most important aspects is to create different layers. If you'd look into my bedroom, layers would mean: The  pile of dumped clothes lying directly infront of you is layer 1, behind them you would see a huge chair and a cupboard bursting with never played video games  forming layer 2, behind that you would see a window being layer 3 and again behind that you would be able to see the outside world I avoid in favour of my healthy pale teint, forming the last layer.

So this picture has 4 layers:

(image: me)

You can have as many layers as you want. This is only an example.


Now you can play with the layers using different methods to gain  more depth (and these are not the technical terms, but they are the easiest to remember):

1) Blurring backgrounds
Have a look at this picture:

(image: me)

Even though we only have two layers (plant and the green background) the photo still appears dimensional. Blurring backgrounds, or items that are far away will create depth. It doesn't always has to be intensly blurred as shown here. Even a slighty diffused hill in the back of a scenery can create depth. 

Also things that are very near to the viewer can be blurred, creating the illusin that the object is so near, the eye of the viewer can't 'focus' it.

2) Blue Fog
If you stand on a hill and look in to the vastness of the wide plains of nowheresland and you will notice the horizont or even the hills to appear blueish or greyish blue.
This is 'blue fog' and can be created by adding white and blue tones to your background. Objects or landscapes missing this blue touches appear nearer.  Adding blue to the last layers of your picture will create depth, especially in landscape paintings.

(image: me)

Layer 2 has a very subtle blue tone, layer 3 adds more with and blue to the green of the hills and layer 4 looks really blue, but has still slight hints of green in it.

Layers:

You can see here quite nicely how the effect works. Just check google for "Landscapes" and you will find thousands of examples.  Try to identify the layers and try to repaint them adding the blue fog. Try also to see what happens if you ignore the blue fog and just paint the hills green.

(image: me)

3) Warm and Cold Colours
Painting objects nearer to a viewer in a warm colour, will let them appear to be nearer.

(image: me)

(image: me)

There's not much to say here :) It's very similar to the last point of this list (contrast and light)

4) One Point perspective or any kind of perspective (a "how to" will be posted, otherwise, check out this book: Vanishing Point: Perspective for Comics from Ground up (and don't let the title fool you, this book is well written and stripped from all the unnecessary complexity))

This is no big science: Lines pointing toward a certain point at the horizont will produce perspective.
If you look at early medieval art (very symbolic imagery, no perspective guidelines whatsoever) and compare them with paintings from the Renaissance  (very realistic, tried to copy what they saw in real life,'discovered' perspective), you will notice the difference this can make.

Perspective? Take it home, old man, we don't need that here.

(taken image from talktalk)

Praise the one point perspective!

(taken image from wikipedia)

5) Light / Contrast differences between layers
Making objects or landscapes in the first layer either darker or lighter can also alter the depht of a painting. Just choose a light source (sun, light bulb, etc) or a object casting the shadow (door, tree, hill, etc) and try to boost the contrast and/or light/darkness between the different layers.

(image: me)

That's all for today!

Let me know if I missed out on something or if you have better ideas how to boost the depht in your paintings/drawings!

Have a nice day!

Yasmin

Analyzing: My Brain and the ability to see shadows

During my first painting lesson our teacher made us paint  white objects with brushes as thick as a my wrists. The goal of this was to get a sense of shading and light. Since we only had white objects the shades were better viewable and the thick brush would hinder us to get lost in irrelevant details.

I must admit I was pretty bored at the start and my pictures looked like a huge mess. Black and white tightly mixed into one grey paste of awefulness didn't really grasp the beauty of the cracked cup lying infront of me.
So I started to try to not mix the colours and avoid going to crazy about smooth gradients.

And it helped.

So... Why did it help?
I tried again to do some smooth gradients but it just didn't seem 'good'. First off all most of these gradients just existed in my mind. I was looking at the object, saw shadows and was expecting gradients because I didn't like the idea of having hard edges and hard contrasts. However with sticking to these stupid guidelines I set up in my fantasy I started to see the object differently as it actually was. Basically I was assuming things, even though proof of me being wrong were directly in front of my very eyes.

That's the point were it made "click" and I got this pretty "AHA"-effect. Also I understood how long you  have to stare at things to understand why you're doing it wrong. Sure thing that I didn't master seeing shadows, since my brain tends to be rather slow-witted and dumb, but I am getting there. It just needs loads of staring and analyzing and getting annoyed by not getting the shadows right at the first fifty attempts.

I bet some of you guys will be in the same position at the moment of understanding shading and light. Just keep in mind that your brain needs to adjust to visual work and stop the habit of  putting your expectations , how something should look like, into reality.
This process of 'really seeing' needs time. (and tantrums which you will be throwing because you'll be enjoying learning sooo much)

And I like unicorns, make unicorns instead! D:<

While trying to not make the introduction-post sound boring, it actually starts to sound really boring: "Simple introduction"

Hello great world of blogging!
So now I am writing a blog. What an experience! (<-  me being super enthusiastic about it :) )
I'm not even sure, if someone is reading my very first post. I guess not, since there are loads of other great blogs around... But if you're reading: Hello! Happy to see you here :) Maybe if you just let me know, that you exist, that would be very nice. Motivating, I guess.
I'll stop brabbling on now, since you most definitely want to know why I am writing and why you might be interested.
Well, I am very, very much into art and currently visiting a precourse to start a higher art education. Since I am a crap at "writing things you should remember into a book" I thought I'll just open a blog and post everything art-related that I found, learned, think to be fascinating and engaging, shareable by everyone.
Also I am actually hoping, that there are people out there who want to share their thoughts on the findings I have made and/or learn with me about this very bright and lovely topic.
Furthermore you will be learning a lot of basic drawing and painting techniques and materials, find out about new artists and cool things you should try out to advance in your hobby (or occupation) and concepts, that I heard off either in school or from other people.
But most importantly I want to collaborate with people that are currently too in a learning process (and this includes not just people in schools but also everyone that is simply willing to learn more about being creative).

Regarding my person: I am currently 20 years old, Swiss, talk-active and a happy comic-reading videogame fanatic. I have a cool cat, live in a very nice flat share and tend to dance around in my room, singing my head off and buying tons of books that I don't even really need but want because they are pretty (there will be some shown in this blog).

So! That's all for today. Blogging will be done at leas once a week! If not, please kick me for being lazy D:<

Have a lovely day
Yasmin