Think Draw - Picture

Title: An Eye
created on 25 May 10

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Comments on this picture (24):
1. chelydra wrote: Hi Hanging, and Happy Birthday! Your present from me is a portrait tip... perspective in a face is subtler but just as crucial as perspective in a cityscape or a still life. except maybe in silhouette-like side views or a full-face view.
2. chelydra wrote: The one imperfection in your Brewster is the cheekbone perspective being reversed - the side beyond his nose needs to diminish as it crves away out of our view, the cheekbone on our right needs to grow...
3. chelydra wrote: DEPTH PERCEPTION is much under-rated or totally ignored in 99.99% of art lessons (my own being the only exception I'm aware of)...
4. chelydra wrote: ...depth perception, a.k.a. stereoscopic or binocular vision (one of Brewster's concerns, appropriately enough) gives your brain two contradictory images to synthesize, which is quite a trick --
5. chelydra wrote: --in fact I read somewhere that the expansion of the brain to accomodate deoth perception was wasnwhat sent our species down the big-brained evolutionary route (life in trees makes it a life-or-death necessity)...
6. chelydra wrote: ...when drawing what you see in the real world, you can activate (enhance) D.P. by looking with one eye, then the other, then both. Spaces magically appear; forms assert their three-dimensional volume, and you also get a more definite idea of where YOU ar
7. chelydra wrote: ...where you are in the space you inhabit. In practice this results in a picture that just slightly exaggerates all perpective effects...
8. chelydra wrote: ...and this is especially the case when your own point of view in close to the subject (e.g., two feet, not two yards from someone's face)...
9. chelydra wrote: (IS close not in close)... Of course in drawing from a photograph (which offers perpect perspective but no depth perception unless its a stereoscope's double-image), you have to imagine it and fake it.
10. chelydra wrote: In other words, those subtle perspective effects have to not only be included, but also exaggerated a bit. The more they're exaggerated, the more you involve the viewer, by bringing the POV (both POVs, both the viewer's eyes)...
11. chelydra wrote: ...into closer proximity with the subject, so it feels like Mr Brewster is right HERE, breathing on us, making his presence forcefully felt.
12. chelydra wrote: (in #9 above, perpect should be perfect) ALSO, think of all forms as having not outlines but horizon lines... they curve around out of view, but the form is no less real for being our of view. You're aware of that already, it seems, but it's always a goo
13. chelydra wrote: ...a good idea to be consciously, as well as intuitively, aware of such things.
14. chelydra wrote: In looking again at your Brewster, I see the aerial perspective of his eyes is reversed too... just as remoter objects (mountains for instance) fade out towards gray in a landscape, the atmosphere is a super-subtle presence even in close-up views (portrai
15. chelydra wrote: ...ts, still life). As in linear perspective, the first rule is to not reverse this effect - don't make the farther object more vivid than the closer one. The second rule is to fade out the farther object MORE than might seem justified. I suppose this is
16. chelydra wrote: ...because your eyes are presumably more focused on the closest features, making them sharpest and most vivid (most contrasty), as what's father away, being...
17. chelydra wrote: ...slightly OUT of focus, starts to blur a little bit (losing the distinctness and contrast)... I guess that'll do for now. Agan, happy birthday...
18. chelydra wrote: ...and thanks, or thanks again, for your support and flattery, which I eat up voraciously, adrift in my grubby little studio,..
19. chelydra wrote: Footnote: like electromagnetic radiation (a.k.a. light) and gravity, linear perspective operates within the Inverse Square Law (double the distance, quarter the area, tripe the distance, one-ninth the area, since both height and width are reduced to 1/2 o
20. chelydra wrote: or 1/3 but you multiply HxW to get the area... DEPTH PERCEPTION, which reveals VOLUME (taking us from 2-D to 3-D vision) add that third dimension of depth, so it takes the next step...
21. chelydra wrote: ...which is HxWxD... entering the realm of CUBES, not just squares... So with both eyes open, we are now dealing not with the Inverse Square Law but (I guess) some kind of Inverse CUBE Law... hence the exaggeration of perspective...
22. chelydra wrote: By the way, the imperfections in your Brewster are no more glaring or significant than the imperfections in my Brewster... You really did do a good job with him.
23. chelydra wrote: OH S---!!! I thought Ms. ThinkDraw had corrected the glitch that makes lots of new comments on old pictures put them up to the top of the gallery!!!
24. chelydra wrote: The whole idea was to send you this as privately as possible...