Amanda Williams - Portfolio

My pet interest is colour theory. Not just the “normal” one but all of them: obscure, technical and obsolete. For a long while books after book arrived at Studio A from around the globe - mostly secondhand, cheap and old. Why not go back to the source, eh? I read everything that came in and, for that matter, did pretty much all the suggested exercises. Used a lot of paint for a while there…

If I were to boil down what I learned into a practical course it would be this:

Values
Can’t go past the Munsell Student Set for getting values nailed down and understanding hue, value and chroma. It comes with little colour chips (like tiny paint chips) that the intrepid gets to organise and stick down on the charts supplied. Worth the effort. Not a huge read (it come in a small ring binder) but it covers it and it works. The value chart you make is really small but it is enough, with some practice, to mix the greys to make a bigger chart - an exercise that is an absolute must. Frustrating first up but worth persevering.

If you can’t stretch to the book the Color Academy has a pretty good tutorial on Munsell. Then get a grey scale with a 1 to 10 range from somewhere and mix the string of greys. Then mix another colour in the same string of values (tones) by mixing and squinting til they read the same. Better still, don’t stop at one colour, do ten. Or, even better, make it twenty. You want to be able to do this without thinking about it. Plus - and this is important - it sensitizes your eye to see values in your subject.

Colour
The second exercise is Michael Wilcox’s Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green. Michael’s theory is much debated and I’m not going get into the fray because, to be honest, I can’t be bothered. What is of value here are his exercises. And yes, that means doing them - all of them - just reading is a waste of time. You’ll not only get your head and brush around warm, cool and knowing what to mix for what you’ll end up with a set of charts in own poison, be it oils, acrylic or watercolour, that are good to have around.

I ended up doing two sets: oils and watercolours. Yes, that did involve mixing thousands of little squares… It worked. A friend at a plein air get together was fussing over having left a tube of something at home. A quick forage through her box yielded a couple of others that mixed and matched the colour on per painting perfectly. Problem solved (or Solvered for the locals. West Australian in-joke). She needs to do Blue and Yellow… Oh, and didn’t need the same colours used in the exercises either.

All combined Munsell and Wilcox are probably going to chew through 6 or 7 tubes of paint, a bunch of small panels or a couple of pads of those hideous fake canvas sheets. (Yuk.) I used panels - 3mm MDF cut to approx A5 primed with acrylic gesso. Made a template with a sheet of acetate - cardboard would do - to trace on the little boxes. For watercolour, just used fairly cheap watercolour paper from Artshed - make sure it’s white not cream. Other than that: determination. Both paint and patience will be paid back in the time saved mixing colour, ending up with a small palette for ever and getting mixes right first go. Oh, and losing the frustration with all that? Priceless.

Have fun (and it is fun),
Amanda

Tones, or values, are more important in representational painting than colour. A strong statement? Think about it - a black & white photo tells you everything you need to know to identify an object, colour just makes it prettier…

Estimating values is for many the tough part of learning to paint. Squinting helps but even then: what’s what? A value chart gets around that by giving something to measure against. I followed Paul Foxton’s lead and made a set of Munsell “chips” a while back (the bits of wood in the photo) to do exactly that. Using them, by the way, did not turn out to be a crutch for life, as some folks reckon, it was only a matter of months before I was mixing the greys without looking and for the most part even thinking about it. They’re in my head (somewhere…).

Now, that’s all very fine when painting from life in the studio or (gasp!) a photo or other reference. Yeah, I do use photos when I need them. For one I paint ’til late (* think 2am…) and there ain’t much out there to see if one is painting landscape. Or in my recent clouds series: not many to be seen in Chittering over the past months. OK, so there’s the occasional fluffy white against the endless blue but not a one of the moody storms I had in mind. Besides, getting on into the series, I needed inspiration cos my plan calls for a hundred studies - I got to 67 before a more urgent project elbowed them aside - I’ll be back. Anyway, on topic, photos rock sometimes and dovetail very nicely with a value chart or chip while learning to see.

However (there is a point to all this), when I switched from using prints to a screen to display my reference (lots of reasons: among them zooming in on detail and way better depth of colour) there was a problem. Holding the chips up to compare to the screen didn’t work because the screen is bright and light and no matter what angle I held the chip to it I couldn’t get a match as I could with the hardcopy.

That’s where a tiny freeware utility called Pixel Pixie came in. What does it do? Simply a small box (on my screen about 4cm wide) floating over the top of any other software that’s running it displays all kinds of colour info - among them HSV. It does other stuff too but that’s what we want right here. The V in HSV stands for value… the value of the pixel at the end of the pointer. Can you see where this is going?

Read the values off the image, match it to a Munsell chip (or other value chart as you wish) and from there to your paint. Maybe in 10% divisions where, say, everything in the twenties is a value two, or the 50’s a value five etc. This works nicely with Munsell which goes zero for black through to ten for white. Some other value charts have it back to front - no problem - a nice fat red crayon can fix that…

The end result won’t be perfect, of course, because that’s where the art rears it’s head again. Beyond the blocking in of a painting it’s time to “go with the force” (Peter Dailey said that in class once - it still has me chuckling) and adjust to your eye and temperament. It can also be desirable to change values on the fly - raising or lowering the temperature of the painting by mapping to a compressed range. For example, decide that it’s a really moody sky and move everything down to a smaller range of dark colours.

Anyway, have a go, because anything that takes the frustration down a peg or two is worth doing and don’t worry about getting dependent on any tools (photos, chips or software) ‘cos at some point the eye does kick in, especially if you have a guess first, then Pixel Pixie or compare a chip to check it.

Have fun.
Amanda

(* Painting day and night (really should get a life…) offers another problem: colour shifts under different light. I solved the problem with two Daylight lamps: one on the easel and another over the palette table. Works OK. A perfect south facing window - Australia remember - and shorter working hours would be better but neither of those is happening any time soon.)

The bulk of this post is more or less a copy of an email to an artist friend a few days ago, slightly edited to suit a blog post. My feeble excuse for such a shortcut is that the pressure of study is such that I’m lucky to be able to do this much!

What has me so excited is partly the new light on Seurat’s work, partly a new way to think of colour usage but most importantly a fine example of writers writing what they have read, not what they know. Enough to make me rant…

Another words, it’s about the perpetuation of fiction peddled as facts. For students the continuous regeneration of errors in book after book is a serious disservice to their learning and that of the students some of them will go on to teach. I don’t for a minute blame those teaching, now or past, they too have been hoodwinked by books written by those claiming to be expert. It’s simply of matter of those who would be published making reasonable effort to check their facts. Please.

Rant over. The story begins (quoting directly from my email, as stated above):

Right now I’m reading (for myself - not uni - in between the crippling loads of required reading…) a book called Advice to Young Artists in a Postmodern Era by Williams Dunning. Don’t let the title put you off - no way is this book for truly young artists. It would be completely wasted on them. Besides which, we are all young artists - if not might as well give up.

I’ll quote, rather rather than paraphrase, in case I miss something (aren’t scanners wonderful!)

Context:

Studies of students from all fields consistently indicate that art students in general have read less than those in most other disciplines. But when successful people in all fields are compared to successful artists, the artists register as among the best and the broadest read of all the professionals. The implication for artists here is quite clear: don’t read, don’t succeed.
Gilmore also argues convincingly that “the higher the level of creative activity involved, the more compelling the need for a cohesion of studio practice, awareness of art history, and critical analysis, as well as [a] general education” (Gilmore i991,37)•
Furthermore, those who read little can seldom discuss art intelligently, and an ability to discuss the ideas in your field is indispensable…

Now, the good bit:

But never allow what you read or what you know to blind you to your own vision, and never allow what you have read or heard shape what you see or experience. During my years in art school I read in several books, and I heard from several art history instructors, that the pointillists, especially Seurat, mixed their pigments additively. I was told that when Seurat and the pointillists wanted a green, they did not use green out of a tube; instead, they placed small dots of blue and small dots of yellow next to each other and let the color fuse additively in the eye to create a green that was livelier than any that could be mixed subtractively.
Josef Albers, the patron saint of color, wrote an inspired book, Interaction of Color; I believe this to be the best method ever devised to teach color empirically rather than theoretically. But on the mixing of green in pointillism, he made the same mistake everyone else was making. He tells us what he has read rather than what he has seen, and noting what he has seen is usually his strong point. About the impressionists (pointilists were originally called impressionists) he wrote: “Instead of using green paint mixed mechanically from yellow and blue, they applied yellow and blue unmixed in small dots, so that they became mixed only in our perception-as an impression” (Albers 1963, 339). Albers has just reiterated the classic misconception about retinal (actually partitive) color mixing.
When I was working on an M.EA at the University of Illinois, I visited the museum at Chicago Art Institute. I specifically wanted to see Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, the painting that is usually named as exemplary of the theorizing mentioned above. I stood in front of that painting and looked carefully for tiny intermingled dots of blue and yellow that would mix additively in the retina to make green.
There were none!
There was no place on that canvas that I read as green where I could find blue and yellow dots intermingling. Seurat had used dots of several different shades of green to depict the lawn and the foliage and those areas he wanted green (which generated a more vibrant green). Among these different shades and colors of green dots, he placed here and there a dot of red, which tends to make the green seem even brighter and more vibrant.
He chose red because the impressionists and the pointillists still used Brewster’s by then outdated red, yellow, and blue primary colors to construct their color wheel; hence they believed red was the complement to green, and they had learned correctly from M. E. Chevreul’s Laws of Simultaneous Contrast that adjacent complements create supersaturated color that is perceived as brighter (more saturate) than any pure color alone.
In the bright sunlit areas on the lawn, Seurat interspersed dots of yellow to make those areas yellower (lighter and warmer); and in areas of deep shadow he interspersed dots of blue, which made the shadows darker and cooler.
This came as a shock to me. I wondered if those writers and art historians had ever looked at pointillist paintings.

A bit of an eye opener? The guy who wrote this is professor of fine arts at Central Washington University. The book is published by Syracuse University Press. Another words: he has cred. It is certainly enough to have me off looking for decent reproductions of Seurat’s work.

Amanda

I already knew of notan or rather I thought I did, when I picked up this book. If asked I would have said that notan was used in Japanese art and that it’s about creating balance between dark and light.

Having now read Dorr Bothwell and Marlys Mayfield’s book Notan, the Dark-Light Principle of Design I realise that my explanation, while correct, was rather short of the mark. Notan is in fact far more interesting and more powerful.

Bothwell and Mayfield’s book was originally published in 1968, and has seen a number of editions since, none of which are particularly expensive. Even better, for the modern art student of insatiable curiosity, struggling under a limited book budget, this classic has been republished by the ever affordable Dover, making it is easy to find and in my opinion well worth the effort.

The first surprise for me was that it’s more of a workbook than a reader since each chapter finishes with an exercise in cutting and gluing. I was also surprised at it’s stature - after ploughing through some hefty books on colour theory I was expecting something bigger and more boring. This one however packs an impressive mind shift into a small format, running to just 79 pages, which makes it an easy weekend project at a leisurely pace. Don’t rush it mind, this is one to play with. Be warned too that you’ll be needing a few sheets each of black paper, white paper and then toward the end a couple of mid grey. I wasn’t unaware and was caught out, an hour from a likely store and had to manage with blue and brown and… thankfully it still worked.

Each chapter builds on the previous and as with many such books it’s real worth is in the doing rather than the reading. It looks simple and the principles are simple, to be sure, but understanding comes from doing the exercises not just reading and thinking “yeah, I got that”. It’s about stretching the imagination just a little. It’s fun too!

(That point about doing the exercises reminds me of an episode in class one time. Michael Wilcox’s book Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Greenwas mentioned and someone said that it was good book but it didn’t help her much. I was surprised and curious. I asked if she had done the exercises. Her answer: “Oh, no.” with a note of surprise implying that something like that would be far too much work. Right then. One more time, just for Shirley, it’s all in the doing! One doesn’t get fit looking at the pictures of the push-ups in the book.)

Ok, back to nitty gritty on notan. First up are some interesting exercises on symmetrical and asymmetrical balance, which are then combined with a look at positive and negative spaces and how they might be used together. The first exercise was to design a simple symmetrical image based on a square. The only method involved cutting shapes and flipping them to create mirrored positive and negative shapes. Below is one of mine. Very simple design. (The examples in the book are more complex than this but you get the idea?)

Taking the same process further we then try an asymmetric design. I know - it would look more punchy in black on white. but blue was on hand. (I’ll fix the rest of the images in Photoshop!)

Next came the exciting part which is creating a sense of movement and tension.Have you noticed that some images have an uncanny ability to be two pictures in one - a sense of flipping from the positive to the negative depending on how you look the picture.

I’ll use one of mine as an example (I had fun with this and did a few…). If you focus first on the white (ok it looks grey here… but the paper was white) the image appears to be a series of wiggly white bands on a black background. If you then focus on the black instead, the image becomes a black square with wiggly cut-outs. Then you can go backwards and forwards flipping the image by focusing on one colour or the other - thereby creating said tension and movement.

When a design has a balance of dark and light that achieves this effect of movement, then it has notan. Cool, yes?

Next is a slightly more difficult example using an extra colour. In this instance the aim is to design in such away that the grey bands always stay with the black as the image focus is flipped back and forth from the black to the white. Not so easy - the balance really needs to be right to get what Bothwell and Mayfield refer to as “predominance and subordination”.

Here’s mine: focus first on the grey/black shapes and then on the white, making each come forward in turn to create a different image.

That is pretty much the end of the notan exercises and the book then covers some design principles (with a few more opportunities to play with the scissors and glue) then a bunch of examples from different art styles.

I have found since working through this project that I look at things differently. The variations on these themes are endless and the application to many types of art limited only by the imagination of the artist. The question would be how to apply these principles to colour… worth pondering.

Amanda

Sometime ago I came across a reference to a book by Frank Covino called Controlled Painting. It was published by North Light Books back in 1982 and while it is showing its age here and there it is still an absolute gem for anyone interested in applying Munsell theory to realistic painting.

At the time I was looking for a copy it was reasonably expensive (no doubt reflecting how valued it is) and was a bit beyond me - then I discovered I could create a “Want” on ABE books specifying a maximum price so I would get an email when a copy came up that matched. (You need to be signed on and then take a look on your members page - it’s right there on the sidebar menu.) It took a while but I have it. I’ve since discovered that a copied version is also available direct from Frank Covino.

Frank has been using and teaching a method of painting with a controlled palette based on
Munsell values since the late 60’s - just goes to show that this Munsell thing isn’t some recent novelty!

I have to say I enjoyed reading this book just to gain an insight into the ideas and opinions of someone who has been painting for so long. And Frank is bold with his opinions - on everything from teaching methods to the use of photography as an artists tool. His explanations of the Golden Proportions and composition are as good as any I have read, and even though I know this stuff, I benefited from the refresher.

Another point of interest is that he doesn’t appear to require the user to have a Munsell book on hand. He explains how it works and then has the user work it out from grey values. It’s easy enough to follow and if you’re not trying to match paints to absolute accuracy for some outside purpose - just your own paintings - I don’t see anything wrong with the method. In fact it helped me lighten up a bit on my own use of the charts - realising that I don’t have to be perfect no one is going to manufacture 50 zillion cans of spray paint from my rendering of any given colour. What a relief.

Frank also gives pretty good guidance through making up a set of colour charts (which are used instead of the Munsell book) and a palette - either glass or acrylic with the grey values underneath - just as some of us have been making for ourselves. A little better than mine too - on his version the strips of values aren’t just a patch off to the side they are as big as the palette.

His notes on which colours to use to get close to particular hues and values are useful too - even though they’re a bit swayed to Liquidtex which aren’t readily available down here - there are enough suggestions of substitutes to be able to work it out. (And if all else fails - know which colour to mail order…) Also this shows how long Liquidtex have been making Munsell numbers available on their paints - very impressive.

All in all, I’m happy with this book (ignoring the chapter on SLR cameras..) and reckon it’ll be keeping me even busier for a bit. Even though I do have and use the Munsell Student Set I’m going to make up a set of colour charts following Frank’s guidelines. Hmmm, and a new underlay for my glass palette while I’m at it.

Amanda

I just finished leaving a comment over at All the Strange Hours in response to a great article on Munsell and colour theory in general. Then realised I could actually say as much as I liked on the subject and even go off on a tangent now I have my own blog - old habits and all that.

I’ve been fascinated with colour since I took a class in Colour Theory a couple of years ago. Prior to that I’d mostly dealt with colour as it applied to print not really thinking about it much - just using it to get the job done. Of course I knew the basics - like any kid who has ever had a box of watercolour, I knew that red and yellow make orange.

It became more interesting as an adult with the oil paints. No longer happy with just any shade of orange I wanted to mix the one I could see in the landscape before me - OK so I could just buy a tube of Australian Sienna - but really…

The colour class I took merely whetted the appetite. From there I picked up a book called Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green by Michael Wilcox and read it from end to end. Pretty good. Unfortunately it didn’t help much until about six months later when faced with a college level paint class the desperation forced me to pick it up again and actually do the exercises. Yes, mix all 2500 colours. It was worth every little dollop of paint. I’ve had no colour mixing issues since. Yes, it did add up to a lot of paint. And rags. And lots of little MDF panels that I used for the task. Still it was worth it. I will save far more than paint in my coming years of painting - and a lot of frustration too.

Then I came across Munsell theory which Graydon Parrish has been working with and teaching as a practical painting tool. I sent away for the Munsell Student Set, read it first and then having learned my lesson previously immediately began working through the suggested exercises. That fixed any hue and chroma confusion…

Now, of course, I’m still painting grey cubes but that’s just continuing the experiment. The nature of the beast is well understood. Hey, I can mix the eight shades of grey between black and white on the Munsell Value Scale - pretty darn accurately in about 30 minutes… OK so I’ve had to mix and paint the scale quite a few times. I’m not that fast a learner. Making the cubes and then painting the still lives of them as Graydon suggested is one incredibly useful exercise. Just ask Paul.

Still asking questions, I’ve been reading about Wilhelm Ostwald’s theories and their practical application in book by Faber Birren called Creative Color. Ostwald, a Nobel scientist in chemistry, corresponded with Munsell but at some point took his study in a different direction. He identified what he called the “uniform chroma scale” - or shadow series - which he says is the secret behind the richness and luminosity of chiaroscuro. Instead of mixing black and white to a given colour to change the values - a touch of the original colour is added too so the proportion of hue content is kept constant. So yes, now I’m mixing chroma scales too. More paint. I like theory that has practical application and experiments so I can see for myself.

As I said, I’ve had practice working with cyan, yellow and magenta in the print industry. Then a few more years mixing oil paints on the basis of red, yellow and blue. My husband is an electronics engineer and has explained really well how the red, green blue of my monitor works. Three different systems - all of which work - differently. Grrr…

Always the kid wanting to know “why”, “just because” won’t do - I had to keep reading.

Recently I came across a thread at Wet Canvas written by WF Martin - that really made my head spin and essentially solved the problem for me. It does fit together! Not for any particularly practical purpose - I’m still playing with Munsell greys and Ostwald chroma scales - but it settled the whole issue in my head. So go read this man’s explanation (and do the exercises!) with an open mind. It’s an eye opener.

Amanda

I’ve returned to the three cubes because I have a brand new cloth. OK so it’s just an offcut from the end-of-roll box at the fabric shop but the colour is right - a nice N4 grey on the Munsell value scale. Hopefully it’ll make the exercises a bit more useful.

My photo of today’s setup is a bit dark but it shows what I’m working from.

The first painting is a standard effort, as measured, with one difference at the light end. It’s amazing what a day off can do for freshening up the eye - when I set this up and began measuring I could see that the light side wasn’t a flat tone as I had thought but was in fact light until most of the way up and then gradated down a tiny bit and then showed the lighter highlight along the edge.

This is painted that way. White paint at the bottom of the light side gradating to N9 at the top, then a white highlight along the edge. That way I get a white side and a white highlight without losing a step as I did on the earlier exercises. This isn’t the only way to paint this - I think the other mappings of the tones were just as valid - each version shows a different effect. This one looks like three cubes in somewhat dull light. The definition on the black cube is lost - but that is exactly what I was seeing.

For this one I experimented with shifting the values a bit to try to make it look like it was under lighter lighting conditions. Playing with the new lighter cloth must have gone to my head - I’ve painted it too light and the effect of the cast shadows isn’t convincing. Obviously there’s more to it than just adjusting all the tones by one step.

Today’s paintings are pretty much the same as yesterday with the addition of cones and spheres. I also left out the black cube so I could use the values I have to better effect on the grey one.

This first effort at painting a sphere was one of those penny-drop moments - the tones are the same as the cube, just blended a bit and a lighter patch to show the reflection from the grey cube. There was no reflection from the cloth of course because it’s too dark.

In this one I added the grey cone to make it just a bit more difficult. I also angled the white cube differently to make it a bit darker on the shadow side. I ended up with it measuring the same as the sphere - giving me a lost edge. I also experimented with softening the edges more - particularly on the sphere. I think I went a bit too far. The cone is probably the more successful.

More grey cubes, this time in groups of three. The last exercises showed that the problem areas are at the extremes of light and dark. These exercises, I think, show that the real power is in the middle values.

The adjustments to compensate for the limitations of the white and black paint are the same in these grouped cubes as they were for the single cubes - except of course - that they’re all happening at once.

At the light end I have foregone the white highlight on the edge of the cube and used my white paint for the light side. The values from there down are as they are measured. At the black end I still had the problem of the shadow side of the cube being darker than my black. I painted it the same as the cast shadow. Even though I started as light as I could I still ran out of steps, it was even worse on the next painting as I will show.

Paul at Learning to See has suggested that changing the cloth for a lighter one would make these exercises more worthwhile because I’d have more steps to play with. I think he’s right (as always!).

This second example is slightly different. At the light end I chose to paint the lightest side with N9, preserving the white paint for the light highlight. This forces all the values for the white cube down a notch to compensate. The grey cube is as seen but again minus one value to be in step with the white cube.. At the black end I have run out of values and have no choice but to paint the top, the shadow side and the cast shadow all in the same black paint. The effect is still convincing. Three cubes on a dark cloth.

That’ll do for today. The others I painted were all variations on these, just moving the mid value up and down for different effects. Trying to keep the relationships so the form was convincing but under different conditions - soft light, bright light, chiaroscuro and Aussie sun…

Amanda

Finally, the first paintings of the cubes. This exercise was started with the cutting of the wood for the cubes on the 29th March… all I can say is that college, entries for three exhibitions, umpteen attendances at life drawing sessions and just plain life got in the way.

I’m on holidays again now. I have a month. I have plans…

The first painting is the mid grey (value 5 on the Munsell scale). I figured this would be the easiest and therefore number one. I just measured each tone against my Munsell chips and painted what was there. A slightly wonky cube but it is the first and these are exercises not masterpieces.

Next the black cube. A little more difficult because the dark cloth is making the cast shadow very dark. Cast shadows always depend on surface they are on NOT the object doing the casting.

The shadow side of the black cube is darker than the cast shadow - black in shadow vs dark grey in cast shadow - but when I measure with my Munsell chips the black chip is a good match for the cast shadow. Obviously I’m not going to be able to match the dark side of the cube. Problem? Not really, that’s what these exercises are about - measuring what’s there and then mapping that to the available paint. It’s the relationship between the tones not the tones themselves.

So I figure I have two ways to paint this - use the black for both the cast shadow and the shadow side of the cube since they’re so close - or use the black for the darker one and the next value up for the others to preserve the relationship.

I painted both versions. The one shown here is the first option: paint both black. I was dubious as to whether this would give a convincing cube on a dark grey cloth. I think it worked.

The next exercise was the white cube which had similar issues to the black one but at the other end of the scale. The light side of the cube looked lighter than my white chip. There was also a white highlight on the top edge of the light side that looked even lighter.

Two options again. My first version uses white for the light highlight on the edge and then my next lightest value - N9 in Munsell notation - for the light side. The other tones are as measured with the chips but painted one shade darker to compensate for the N9 on the light side. Amazingly it still looks like a white cube even though none of the sides are actually painted with white paint.

The second white cube is done differently. This time I have ignored the highlight and painted the lightest side with the white. The effect is still a white cube but it looks like it’s catching a brighter reflection. You can tell that’s Australian sun shining on that cube - definitely an effect I have a use for!

That’s it for today…
Amanda