Advantage or Handicap? - Page 3

Lon Haverly · 04-14-2002, 02:03 PM

Who would know!

Karin Wells · 04-14-2002, 04:27 PM

Cool! LOL

Mike McCarty · 04-14-2002, 08:31 PM

Lon, for this work I would try and smooth out some of those wrinkles under the eyes and trim that brow on our right. Do you have a photo ref.?

Michele Rushworth · 04-14-2002, 08:46 PM

Nice composition, just eyes, long horizontal canvas!

An artist in my area does big canvases of just closeups of parts of faces. He wants to see how small an area of a face he can paint to communicate the likeness.

Debra Norton · 04-14-2002, 11:38 PM

As long as we're on weird eye stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with art, I have to tell my story. My oldest daughter has part of one pupil missing. A pie shaped piece, about 1/6th of the pupil isn't there, and the iris extends into the spot. I can tell you I was one freaked out mama when I noticed that on my newborn baby! It hasn't affected her eyesight. One kid told her she had a "Pac Man" eye.

Karin Wells · 04-15-2002, 09:54 AM

I have NEVER had the opportunity to paint someone with "interestingly different" eyes. Dang. I'm gonna keep my fingers crossed that I get a subject like Lon or Debra's daughter someday!

Lon Haverly · 04-15-2002, 02:07 PM

I will have to sell a few dozen oil portraits so I can to commission you, Karin!

Timothy C. Tyler · 09-18-2002, 11:51 PM

I was just sent to this thread as I had started one that was very like this one. I got to say if we paint sight size like Sargent from 30' (making the match-or judging the work next to the subject) then we have to use both eyes. Here's the deal. You can't expect the people looking at your work to close one eye.

Your painting is attempting to match what's next to it, by doing so you create wonderful depth and light. At 30' or 40' you can see the big forms and the soft edges in the round-if you open both eyes. There really should be no agruement over this if one is devoted to sight-size working from life. By the way Sargent's sight wasn't great anfd he chose not to wear glasses for his 40/20 vision so as to keep the edges soft.

Gun sights are different because the depth of field is very "close" and involves focusung here (the sights) and there the target. Sorry for the rant, practice has taught me this to be so.

Steven Sweeney · 09-19-2002, 12:19 AM

Quote:

You can't expect the people looking at your work to close one eye.

I'm not sure anyone has suggested this, Tim, though it's admittedly been a long time since I've read back through this thread. But your reference to gun sights is most instructive, because when I'm doing the measuring for sight-size work, I'm "sighting" through my plumb line (or brush handle or calipers or whatever is preferred) held at arms length. If I don't close one eye, binocular vision prevents me from focusing at such close range on both the plumb line and the object in nature at the same time, which defeats the whole purpose.

Now once the measuring is done, once I no longer need to sight "through" the plumb line, then sure, there's no need any longer to close one eye. Then a different way of seeing takes over, essentially memory work. I look with both eyes at the object in nature, hold that image in memory, then look at my drawing or painting (which should be positioned in the same field of vision as the object in nature) to see if it "matches", and to the extent that it doesn't, and to the extent that the difference is important to me, I make corrections. I do all this with both eyes open (unless I need to squint to see value shapes!!), just as I would expect a viewer to approach the piece.

Margaret Port · 09-19-2002, 09:26 AM

I think David Bowie has different coloured eyes.

The dominant eye technique is very interesting. I often close one eye when drawing but I never actively realized that there was a dominant effect. I expected that the image would be centred. Explains why I am such a poor shot.