One Sunday Afternoon
 

Hello All,

This is a an oil painting I

Face Detail
 

A direct scan where I could try to capture the value range.

Another detail

I've pushed the paints to near the limits in this painting, and it's clobbering my digital technology. Apologies for the egregious use of bandwidth.

Atmosphere
 

Like I said.

Interesting composition John!

Were those floor-tiles inspired by Vermeer?

I like the way you put the objects on the table in an almost geometrical order.

It works very good, spatially.

I like the composition and have no problem with where the center of interest is. The perspective seems to work pretty well too. The face and hands however, could use some reworking. Do you have good reference for those areas, or could you shoot some more?

Greetings Peter and Michelle,

Yes, the floor tiles were inspired by Pieter de Hooch, Vermeer, and lots of other Dutch painters. This is one of those

John,

I like this painting a lot. The floor is off to me, but I like it. The only thing that bothers me is the hand holding the wineglass. Her fingers look so long, almost as if they are as long as the entire hand. Maybe too large as well.

Layout drawing with perspective lines.
 

I had to scan this drawing in three sections and piece it together digitally, but it's accurate enough to show the distortion I added to the floor tiles. The blue and green lines go to the vanishing points for the walls and moldings. The red lines go to the points for the tiles. Clearly, the vanishing points for the walls fall way off the canvas, while the points for the tiles are just off the scan at the edges of the drawing.

What Was He Thinking?
 

When I finished the illustration above, I thought I'd just go ahead and draw the lines for the tiles using the correct vanishing points; i.e. the same ones used for the walls, just to show how it didn't look right that way. Lo and behold! It looked perfectly O.K. to me. Below is the result, with the tiles filled in to give a better idea of the appearance. I have no idea now why I changed it the first time, it was quite a while ago.Sorry if I gave anyone a bum steer by bringing all this up. I'm as confused as you are!:bewildere

KIm, I'll check out that hand at cocktail hour this evening

Hi John, your Vp's should be on the same horizontal line. That'll change the tiles so they look right. (They are kind of interesting wrong though.) Your second to last drawing post with the lines shows this point.

I think it has something to do with the position/ direction of the table. The 'distorted' tiles work better than the 'correct' tiles.

Another note on the tile:

I only see color variations in the white tiles, not the black. I have the same floor pattern in my kitchen and, despite a shameful lack of floor wax, there are reflections in the black tiles as well as the white. Some of your tiles are receiving direct sun rays from the window. They should throw a little light.

Unless there is a goal here of strictly accurate perspective, I

John, since you are as comfortable operating from the skin of math and science as you are from the skin of the painter, I recommend you dig up a copy of Perspective for Artists, by Rex Vicat Cole. I think you'll dig it. He's got another book, also published by Dover, that's more up my alley, The Artistic Anatomy of Trees.

Thanks for all these genuinely perceptive comments! They made me really look at the drawings, the painting, and the subject and try to analyze what I

Dude!

If Thy Hand Offend Thee....
 

I've worked on the left hand for the past week, and wound up with the version below. I read somewhere that Goya charged extra for every hand in a painting. Seems like a smart policy to me. Anyway I've scraped the thing down and beaten it into almost every shape imaginable. Luckily I have the model to hold a wineglass so I could check things out. The overall contour of the hand in this position is pretty accurate, based on direct observation. The lighting is tricky, as a small change in angle relative to the light source makes a big difference in the values of the different parts of the hand.

I've shortened the fingers slightly by extending the palm. I also brought the light around a little bit counter-clockwise. This gives three distinct values in descending order: the distal ends of the fingers, the middle portion after the second joint, and the back of the hand. I also increased the lighted area on the index finger to bring it out over the middle finger. It definitely looks better in the actual painting and I hope it shows in the scans.

I've never put in so much work on 1/2 a square inch of anything, as far as I can remember.

Oh yeah, I apologize for my awful joke in my last post. Sometimes things just come over me. It's like having Tourette's Syndrome. I guess that's what Tim was reacting to.

The Offending Hand
 

A detail of the hand. On screen, this should be about 2 1/2 times the size of the actual painted hand.

John,

I think that looks better.
I keep looking at it and have thought that the wine glass looks too small. Perhaps my wine glasses are larger. Could be I am too used to drinking out of the jug...

Hi Kim,

Well, I guess everything's bigger in Texas. But that's a genuine California bar-size wineglass. I'm serious, my wife does bookkeeping and accounting for a local pub, We bought a bunch of those glasses from her client. They're designed to prevent overpouring by the bartenders, but they're not all that small. You can fill four of them from a 750 ml. bottle. They're hard to find, except through restaurant and bar supply places. Take a whack out of the jug, squint, and look again. It'll look more the right size that way!;)

John

I like that painting!

That blue vertical line on the glass, did you do that after seeing the blue accents in the still-life of the 'Milkmaid' by Vermeer?

Greetings, Peter,

That blue line was inspired by Steven Sweeney rather than by Vermeer. It's hard to see in the scans, but there is actually a little rainbow there. There are, green, yellow and red lines to the right of the blue line. In the middle of the "It's Better Than You Think" thread there is a post where Steven talks about halation and other painterly tricks to represent the effects of intense light. I haven't yet gotten the books he recommended, but his comments got me thinking about reflections and refractions of intense light.

I found that, under the right circumstances like the backlighting in this painting, I would see this kind of prismatic rainbow effect at the edge of the glass. So, I decided to incorporate the effect into the painting. From about a 2 m. viewing distance it looks like a "rainbow fog" to the left of the glass. I haven't gotten it to look exactly like the direct visual experience, but I'll play with it some more and try to post a scan that shows better what's really going on in that area.

I'm deeply appreciative that you like the painting. I'm beginning to like it better myself, although my feelings about it remain profoundly ambiguous. My wife likes it, which is a good sign. Of one thing, however, we can be absolutely certain: Our learned colleague, Dr. C. Tyler, would not be amused by it!

Cheers,
John

John,

Just a drive-by thought.

Well, two, since given recently expressed feelings (by others, elsewhere) for

Fill 'Er Up!
 

O.K. Reaching in the toolbox and grasping another specialized implement generally available to a journeyman and above (Gosh, Steven, is this really necessary? I mean, it seemed so much easier to say the old way!), I've taken Steven's suggestion and made the glass half full.Looks like Pinot Noir to me. In the actual painting it works like a charm, giving dimensionality to the glass, and resolving the issue of light on the thumb. I'm not sure how apparent this will be in the scan. It also has a salutary effect on the composition, because it brings some of the color from the flowers over into the low chroma center of the painting. The other compositional effect is that it really helps complete the triangle formed by the cigarette, the subjects head, the flowers and the extended arm. With the wine showing in the glass, the eye ricochets around inside this triangle with only the occasional foray outside. That was not the case before I put it in. I think this is important because arrayed around/within this triangle are the subject and contemporary mementi mori. Well, I suppose any competent critic could take that statement apart, but it's my painting, so I get to say what I want about it.

It was a brilliant suggestion, Steven!

Detail
 

Here is a large blow-up of the wineglass area showing the treatment of the wine surface and the little "rainbow" mentioned by Peter as a blue line. I've enhanced the "rainbow a bit by repainting it so it will show up well in the scan. It suffers a bit because I have no paint that gives a real spectral green.

No, it isn't. Let's quit accommodating the "Trick"sters, and just do our own best work.

(Though -- it looks like Boone's Farm Strawberry to me, something I'm at least as familiar with as Pinot Noir. But wasn't college fun?!)

Cheers

Hmmm......I have to admit it does look a bit like Boone's Farm strawberry on the monitor. Not that I'd know what that actually looks like, of course, but from descriptions people have given me that's what I'd expect. In the painting I still say it looks like pinot noir, or at a stretch Almaden Mountain Burgundy. Really pushing it, one might say Annie Green Springs raspberry, or possibly JIVE 7, but that's as far as I'm willing to go.