1 July 26
Local Color
A while back I picked up a copy of the book Local Color: Seeing Place Through Watercolor, by Point Reyes artist Mimi Robinson. The book describes a practice for developing observational skills in landscape art. Robinson’s idea is to paint in watercolor a swatch chart of the key colors seen at a locality. These color palettes can be simply be a visual record of place, or serve as a starting point for a subsequent painting.
Or perhaps they can be used in photography? One of the things I have become sensitive to after years of practice in mixing watercolors is how inaccurate photographs can be in illustrating the colors of the lightfield at a scene. Sometimes this is a result of colors being out of gamut, but more often this is because the photograph’s color rendering is emphasizing the wrong combination of hues with respect to what catches one’s eye. A usual workflow in art is to take a photograph of a scene to use as a reference for a painting. I’m imagining the opposite workflow — paint a local color palette while at the scene, and then use that palette as a guide to color grading the photograph in editing.
A common practice in editing a photograph is to adjust the colors of the image until it is aesthetically pleasing. But if this is done at some remove from when the photograph was taken, it is easy to forget what the scene felt like visually. The paradox is that the photograph itself does not supply enough information to interpret the color relationships during the editing.
At left is a page from my nature journal from yesterday, where I am starting to explore this concept. At this time of year in our neighborhood, the dominant colors are the intense cobalt blue of the sky, and the yellow greens of the urban forest canopy, primarily sycamores.
29 June 26
Backyard Bougainvillea
This sketch is of a small portion of the bougainvillea that is growing on the wall of the garage that borders our backyard. Right next to it is a desert willow that is also in flower; the bougainvillea flowers out-saturate the desert willow ones, though they are about the same hue.
28 June 26
Graphite Exploration
I did this drawing yesterday of ivy stems, decades or even centuries old, around an oak tree in Ireland. It’s a painstaking medium starting with lighter strokes and building up layers, requiring a lot of patience (which I don’t have a lot of) and time (which, given that the workshop was only two hours long, there wasn’t much of either). I regret going in quite so hard at the outset on the cracks in the bark, because they alter the balance of the whole drawing. I’d say this one is about half done.
27 June 26
Urban Tree Sketching
Perhaps I should focus my weekend urban sketches on trees in the urban environment. This sketch is of a couple of trees on the west side of A Street in Davis, drawn from near the Senior Center.
26 June 26
New Pen, New Ink
A new TWSBI Diamant fine nib arrived along with a bottle of Sepia DeAtramentis Document ink. I took it out yesterday for a spin.
22 June 26
Graphite
There was a massive thunderstorm in Philadelphia today, which delayed the start of the second half of the France-Iraq match. We decided to walk downtown to the local art store and buy some graphite pencils.
I haven’t spent too much time with graphite, being a damn-the-torpedoes-and-just-draw-it-in-ink kind of gal, but I’ve signed up for a graphite hatching workshop next Saturday. I looked through my supply of pencils and it was pretty paltry: plenty of colored pencils and even watercolor graphite pencils, but few pencils in the graphite ranges on the materials list.
Testing out these Faber-Castells with a quick drawing of my left hand, I realize I have learned something from my colored pencil work — you have to build an image up with layers. Start soft (or hard, in terms of lead) and darken as needed.
This drawing is nowhere near done but I would do shading all over the hand to indicate the contours and light source. I’m looking forward to this workshop.
21 June 26
The Day In Its Color
While browsing in the public library several days ago I ran across a photography book from 2012 entitled The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman’s Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America by Eric Sandweiss, a historian at Indiana University. This book describes a remarkable collection of photographs taken between 1938 and 1969 by an amateur photographer named Charles Cushman. The title of the book comes from a line in a poem by Wallace Stevens; the collection consists of 14,500 Kodachrome slides of Cushman’s travels across the United States and a bit abroad. Cushman was a businessman with a lot of opportunity to travel, and he meticulously documented his journeys with his Contax II A rangefinder camera loaded with Kodachrome. This was a time period when most professional and much amateur photography was done in black and white, and color documentary photography was pretty rare then. As such, the collection provides an unusual glimpse in full color of the vernacular landscape of the United States at mid-century. Cushman showed little or no interest in fine art photography, but he had a good eye for composition.
Charles Cushman was an alum of Indiana University, and several years before he died in 1972 he arranged to have his photography collection together with his thorough notes (he recorded the subject and exposure details for every slide he took) donated to the archives at the university. There they sat until 1999 when an archivist unearthed them and realized their value to documentary history. The library got funding to digitize the collection, and all 14,500 slides are available to browse online. Cushman moved to San Francisco in 1953, and I have found it fun to search in the collection for slides of places I know in California.
19 June 26
Out of Gamut
Today Ryan Moulton posted a good article about the colors your screen cannot show you and where to find them in the real world. Computer screens mix colors from red, green, and blue primaries but there are many colors the eye can discern on the color chromaticity diagram that fall outside the triangle defined by the three primaries. Mostly these are greens and cyans.
Moulton provides a guide to where to find these colors in the outdoors. Looking up at the leaves in a deciduous forest glowing in sunlight is one place. The light passing repeatedly through the leaves has the red and blue wavelengths filtered out leaving a pure spectral green at a wavelength of around 550 nm.
Another place is sunlight through depths of pure water. Water rapidly absorbs reds, and if sunlight passes through a few meters of water the color shifts outside of any screen gamut. These colors can be seen from shore when the light reflects off of light sand on the bottom, or from underwater.
Birds and butterflies famously can have intense iridescent colors thanks to the structure of their feathers and wing scales which can have elements that have the same length scale as wavelengths of visible light. Examples of these include peacock tail feathers and butterflies in the genus Morpho.
One needn’t visit nature to find colors that cannot be displayed on a screen. Green traffic lights have a color that falls mostly outside of displayable gamuts. This color has been chosen so as to provide the biggest discernment from red for viewers who are red-green colorblind. Traffic lights nowadays use LEDs which can have quite pure spectral colors.
(Thanks to MetaFilter for the link to the article.)
17 June 26
Seeing in Black and White
Every now and then I get inspired to take photos in monochrome with my everyday carry camera. This makes me view the world in a different way, looking for strong contrasts in value and interesting patterns. Black and white photography can point on one hand towards the visually more abstract and on the other hand towards capturing the essence of interactions.
This image from my recent spell of monochrome photography shows the wall of a nearby church building. It is an example of a black and white photograph that does not work at all if it was in color. What one would see in color is a literal wall of red, overwhelming the image’s patterns.
15 June 26
Drawing Signs
One of my favorite photographers is Walker Evans, who was a master at photographing the American vernacular landscape. We were fortunate enough to see an exhibition of his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art eight-and-a-half years ago. There is a collection of his work published in 1998 that is entitled simply Signs and consists of 50 photographs he took of signage across America.
Signs are important in forming the character of an urban landscape. I was reminded of that a couple days ago when I read through The American Dream? and enjoyed all the illustrations of signage along Route 66 sketched in pen and wash. I decided I needed to sketch more signs, so yesterday I drew the building shown here at left. This hair salon is on G Street in Davis, on the opposite side of the street from the Davis Food Co-op.