I get asked quite a lot about the emphasis I put on accuracy.
Most often, people are curious about whether I think you should always strive for accuracy, or whether it’s something you just do for a while, when you’re learning, and then relax at some point.
The questions usually take one of two forms – people asking me why I do sight size block in practice, when I can already (kind of) draw, and people asking me why I put so much emphasis on colour matching accuracy in my online colour courses.
My feeling is that learning accuracy is excellent training. The best there is, actually. Not least because you learn far more than just being able to hit a colour or accurately replicate a shape.
Those are exceptionally valuable skills, and you’ll struggle more to paint realism well without them, in my opinion.
But training accuracy also teach you focus, stamina, concentration. Learning to replicate the colours you perceive as closely as you can teaches you how light works. You learn to look further, and deeper. You learn the limitations of paint, and how to get round them…so much more than just how to hit a colour.
I think I’ve learned a fair bit from accuracy training, but I still do it. I still try do draw accurately, and often, I still try to match colours very accurately.
In fact, when I’m actually painting, I aim for accuracy a lot – but not necessarily in the whole painting.
So, I thought it might be interesting to show you two different paintings of the same subject, one more “accurate”, or faithful to the subject, and the other more interpretative.
This painting is fairly faithful to the subject. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of it next to the subject, but I was trying, as far as I could, to get the values, the drawing, the colours close to what I saw.
Close up like this, you can see all the brush strokes, but from a distance it hangs together more:
Parts of the painting are still interpretative, though. Mostly the edge handing. I tend to manipulate edges a fair bit, because we don’t see the whole of our visual field with the same degree of focus.
But I matched the colours of the lemons as closely as I could, the colours of the background, and the values of the cloth as closely as I could.
This one could be described as a little more interpretative, perhaps. In this painting, I started with a very high chroma red underpainting. Here it is at the start:
I did that intending to let little patches show through in the finished piece, to give the painting life and also unity. As well, the colours on the subject were quite low chroma and limited in hue – everything was yellow or grey. I wanted to add some variety by letting this underpainting poke through.
Also, you can see the viewfinder with the grid that I often use at the start of paintings, to make it easier to get things in the right place. It gives me some other useful things too, but I’ll perhaps go into those in another post.
When it came to painting the cloth, I tried to get close to the values (I didn’t quite get the lights). When it came to the lemons, I was extremely careful to get the hues as accurately as I could.
I think the painting works *because* the colour of the lemons and the overall values are fairly accurate. In parts of the painting, I’ve gone right across the edges of the forms. But the form still works despite being almost destroyed, and that interplay between dissolving form and realism fascinates me.
I’m not sure that just one without the other, either one, would have worked as well.
The point I want to make is that although these two paintings may appear to be quite different in approach, they both rely on the same basic skills to work – drawing and colour. On accuracy.
I don’t see them as essentially different, just different points on a continuum. Without all the practice with drawing and colour accuracy I’ve done, I wouldn’t have been able to do either of them.
So, when you think about training accuracy, I’d like to encourage you not to see it as a chore, as something you have to do for now so you can drop it later. For realist artists, I think accuracy training is at the heart of what we do, even – perhaps especially – when we depart from it.
What do you think?
Best wishes and thanks for reading,
Paul
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Excellent treatment of the topic. Using these two seemingly very different examples but showing the technical consistency makes a great point.
Thanks,
Martin
Thanks for this excellent article. When you mentioned edges it reminded me of a Sargent quote. I can’t remember it exactly. But he emphasized gently blending edges with the background. Not putting the two edges side by side. You’ve done that beautifully.
I think edge handling is the most often overlooked skill in realism, and certainly one of the most important. I put it up there with values, almost.
I feel learning accuracy is fundamental to beginning to see whether it be shape or color, negative space and values. The more practice the better the accuracy becomes. Sure it’s great for the realism painter but it’s also great when you want to move away from realism into more expressive work because you bring to the work the ability to do what you want yet you know how far to stray before losing the essence of a subject.
Hope this makes sense…lol
I think it boils down to the fact that you need to know the rules before you can break them.
A realist painter can have loose brushwork (Zorn, Sargent), can play with the chroma (Sorolla), or adjust values to enhance form, cause objects to come forward or recede, etc. Realist painters have a comprehensive range of techniques that deviate from accuracy to achieve particular effects. But the key word is ‘deviate’. They have to have the actual accurate image as it is as a starting point (even if only in their minds) to effectively implement alterations to it.
Thought-provoking post, thanks. Paul, it feels like you’re moving into a new phase in your painting by deliberately pushing and breaking the realism. I personally love this direction you’re moving in, and the lemon painting shows how your practice in precision is paying off.
I find that a piece of art is more enjoyable if you are confident that the artist knows what they’re doing. This applies as much to jazz or dance — or any other art form — as it does to painting. If the artist breaks the rules, you can go with them, knowing that they did that deliberately. Having the skills and being in control means the audience doesn’t have to ask: “Is it meant to be like that, or was it a happy accident?” Instead, we can relax and enjoy the show. The study and practice of the artist is an investment in the quality of the experience for the audience.
In terms of realistic artwork, there are a small number of elements that make up the image that can be called ‘acceptable inaccuracies’ while maintaining realism intact:
The accuracy of line – there is some leeway with the initial drawing that can go unnoticed unless compared directly to the subject depicted. Especially with still life and less so with portraiture.
The accuracy of colour – these lemons would still look realistic if they were purple (although incorrect hue).
Details – a misconception of realism is that in order to look realistic, it has to be detailed. Of course, it can help but some of John Singer Sargent’s paintings look realistic with little detail.
There are also the subtle adjustments you can do on your tv picture for example. Brightness, contrast, gamma. Even tweaking the highlights, mid-tones and shadows individually.
What really makes something look real or not are the values. (More accurately tonal relationships – one tone relative to another etc). These are vital for us to understand the illusion of 3d form in the painting that is congruent with how light and shadow work in the real world. Successfully replicate the 2d pattern of light that hits our retinae and the illusion of realism can be achieved. Get it wrong and it won’t look as convincing to our brain.
Spot on
This is all fine and dandy. Each performer will have their philosophy, approach, strategy and technique uniquely purposed to themselves. It is interesting your perspective however, what I would have expected from the narrative is not a personal letter, but such to be followed with exercises, specific studies one can use to enhance the properties you have mentioned.
It is my understanding the Picassios father made him draw a
birds foot for days and weeks on end before he could do anything else.
I have plenty of exercises and studies elsewhere on this site Tom, you need only look around.
The most important thing in a work of art is not if the color is off minutely but, rather what kind of story the art tells in communicating to the viewer on an emotional or intuitive level. Artist are telling stories with their art….. just like the like the Hollywood culture that creates a story that is usually based on an interpretation of events rather than the exact facts of what happened step by step.
A good case in point it the Pieta that Michangelo carved .. from from Wikipedia….”The figures are quite out of proportion, owing to the difficulty of depicting a fully-grown man cradled full-length in a woman’s lap. Much of Mary’s body is concealed by her monumental drapery, and the relationship of the figures appears quite natural. Michelangelo’s interpretation of the Pietà was far different from those previously created by other artists, as he sculpted a young and beautiful Mary rather than an older woman around 50 years of age.[1] The marks of the Crucifixion are limited to very small nail marks and an indication of the wound in Jesus’ side. Christ’s face does not reveal signs of The Passion. Michelangelo did not want his version of the Pietà to represent death, but rather to show the “religious vision of abandonment and a serene face of the Son”….. i
We are story tellers not ones that make the end goal of art to have color as accurate as possible.
I get that realism in art is seen as passe, but I think arguments for and against accuracy are missing the point a bit; a pianist searches for accuracy when practising scales, the audience doesn’t care, and in fact the pianist only cares as the accuracy becomes an unconscious skill to call upon as a tool to express the music.
Exactly. Exactly.