In this post I’d like to explain why I think it is useful to
paint on top of master paintings. Hopefully it is something that you will start
using as a tool to better understand pictures and design. It’s a bit of a
controversial topic from what I have seen (I've had some very negative reactions
when I suggest it to people), and I think it stems from people not
understanding the point of painting on top and why I do it.
To some it may be sacrilegious to “ruin” paintings like this
(which is a bit silly when we are just painting on digital files), or may seem
like an act of hubris as though the original painter was not masterful enough.
But that’s not what this is. The thing with painting and design is that there
are so many layers to it and so many things happening at the same time, so when
analyzing things it can be helpful to isolate one aspect to make it easier to see.
Much in the same way you may turn a painting into a greyscale version to see
the values without the trouble of the hues and saturation, painting on top is
used to isolate one aspect of a painting and see exactly what effect it has on
the whole and hopefully understand why the original artist made the decisions
they did (which you may agree or disagree with).
I also think it is useful
because it helps with the problem of putting certain artists on pedestals and
treating them as gods which make perfect images every time. It is good to be
able to think rationally and trust your own tastes and if you disagree with the
choices a master painter made then that’s okay—in fact it is good to have your
own tastes and opinions and not blindly treat an image as perfect just because
of who painted it. We have to remember that even the greatest artists were
humans too and had their flaws and mistakes.
I like to paint over when I see a painting that has a choice
in it that I would not have personally made. Either it was a very bold or
unusual move, or was a choice that doesn’t coincide with my personal tastes. I
don’t normally save these paintovers, but for the sake of this article I went
into my files and picked out a couple paintings to use as a demonstration. All
I do is remove the decision that the artist made and see how the image would
look without it.
I’ll start off with this painting by Howard Pyle, which
happens to be one of my favourite paintings of his. I could talk for hours
about the various decisions he made in it that I love, but for now I just want
to focus on that red shawl. Pyle often liked to use strong saturated reds in
his paintings, especially at focal points (I suspect it was his favourite
colour). But the strength of that red in this painting is so bold and strong
that I would never have the courage to put it in like that. Why did he make it
just so strong? In lighting situation no red would ever look like that so it is
clearly a decisive move on his part for a very good reason.
So I tried lowering the saturation on it to match the rest
of the clothing worn by the other people.
The first thing I noticed was how dark in value the shawl actually is…in
fact it is the exact same value as the trees behind her. This is a great
example of saturation affecting the perceived value of something (which will be
another topic for an article probably). The
painted over image is more cohesive without the red, but it suddenly seems
boring as everything falls into each other. By painting the shawl such a strong
red Pyle made the girl pop out from the mass of trees and people, and gives her
a lot of attention as well as making her appear slightly out of place. Sure,
she is standing in a large value grouping, but she doesn’t really belong there.
She is out of her element here in the wintery outdoors. The strong red makes
her the target and sets up a relationship between her and the wolf (especially since the entire image is very gray, and the only other strong colour note is behind the wolf). Without the
red the image is simply a wolf standing there and a group of frightened people.
It lacks storytelling and interest. With the red the wolf has a target and the
relationship between them becomes clearer as the townspeople stand by her for
protection. The other thing to consider is the meaning of red. Why did Pyle
choose red instead of any other colour? The red he used is the colour of fresh
blood, it is a very tense and bold colour, and hints at the potential violence
of the situation. It makes the image have much more impact as a scene. By
painting out the red and seeing how much the image begins to fall apart I began
to ask myself more questions about it and gain deeper insight into the choices
he made. If I had simply looked at the image I would not necessarily have come
to the same realizations.
The second image I would like to paint over and discuss is a
landscape by Kenyon Cox. I really love his artwork, especially his figures and
many of his drawings, but in this particular landscape I always found that
front bush to be an odd choice. It’s very large, isolated, and very high
contrast. My eye goes right to it, and I am unsure why he would give it so much
attention when there is nothing special about the bush and there are more
interesting things in the rest of the painting such as the white building on
the righthand side (which is the intended focal point). I notice he connected the
bush and the house with a line of smaller bushes, and my eye keeps going back
and forth along this line, split between the big bush and the house. So of
course I try painting it out.
Without the bush we are left with a wide empty expanse of
grass. While I no longer have issue with
an out of place bush, the image now is very static and boring. I find my eye is
getting caught up in the right hand side of the image and as a whole I am not
really looking around the image much. The balance is thrown off slightly,
though I notice the heavy treeline and second white building on the left near
the horizon does keep it from becoming entirely unbalanced. Still though, it
feels like the image is missing something. So rather than remove the bush
entirely, I experiment with reducing how attention grabbing it is by lowering
the contrast of it. Also by putting this lighter value on the top planes of the
bush I feel it has more form now and feels less like a flat splotch on the
canvas. It also sets the perspective more clearly as we can see more of the top
of this bush than the ones further in the distance where the side of them is
more apparent. Now that the bush is sitting more comfortably in the
composition, and now that I have seen the dark treeline on the left with the
building there, I realize that Cox has crafted a triangular composition between
three points on the painting. This is why without that front bush the image
became very static and the eye did not wander throughout the whole image.
So while I disagree with how Cox handled the front bush, I
now realize the importance of it in the painting. I missed out on the design
behind the image before I took the time to paint on top of it.
I hope that this post gives some insight into what a
powerful learning tool it can be when you paint on top of images to figure out
how they work. Ultimately it is this understanding and ability to break things
down that allows us to apply similar concepts in our own artwork. Too many
people are spoonfed information and never gain the ability to learn on their
own. This type of analyzation is great for discovering your own ideas and
theories in imagemaking, and for discovering some of the things others before
us have come up with to make successful imagery.
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