I’ve been trying to understand some of the old master under painting techniques and I notice theres this shift of browns and greens i see a lot in almost any old master painting of portraits. Are they deliberately adding “green” to the shadows after starting with an all brown base?
Im really interested in how they are building up all these minuet colorfun hue shifts in not just skin but everything.
An example of green being used for skin, ect. (Sargent Painting)
Don’t think about colors as if they exist independently from context. You have to look at the entire image and consider the scene’s light source, ambient light source, radiosity/color bleed, and the mixture of local color and light source color cast as well as mixture with color bleed during radiosity. There’s also the local surface’s own complexity such as subsurface scattering, as well as veins seen through the skin, or the shift of skin color temperature depending on whether there’s a lot of bone or fat under that spot of the skin, or muscle and micro-blood vessels.
Also, color is relative. What looks green often isn’t actually green. If you sample the greenish looking spot, it will very likely not be green at all but simply seem so relative to surrounding colors. Our eyes/brain is very easily fooled, and there are lots of optical illusion examples you can find on the web that demonstrate this. Gray can look like blue or yellow depending on surrounding context.
Traditionally, black is notoriously “dirty” looking when mixed with warm tones, and can appear greenish. Some people use it to cool down the skin tone, but some avoid it and use other cool colors instead of black, since black’s tinting strength is often too strong. If you don’t have any traditional painting experience, you might want to do some experiments yourself–you’ll learn some very interesting stuff. Try mixing different flesh tones. Try using different cool colors to cool down warm colors and see how each affects the warm color differently. Try to mix the exact colors you see from an oil painting–in fact, do a few master copies traditionally, and you’ll learn so much that you won’t learn just by guessing and thinking. Sometimes you need to get your hands dirty in order to learn the valuable lessons.
All of these various scientific factors are what creates the results you see. This logical but often overlooked aspect of visual art is what separates the advanced artists from those who aren’t as experienced. Advanced artists know about this stuff and thinks about it when they work, while beginners rarely know this stuff, and intermediate artists usually only know some aspects but are missing just as much knowledge/insights as they know, or they don’t think enough about these factors.
Most aspiring artists are woefully lacking in the understanding of the logical aspects of visual art–they too often mistakenly think that drawing and painting is all some kind of mystical black magic and only people with “talent” can do it. The truth is just the opposite. So much advanced artistic sensibility is actually very scientific and logical–from the readability of forms, contrast ratio and values, radiosity/color bleed, color harmony/complements, local color shifts, subsurface scattering, specularity of surfaces, composition arrangement, anatomy, body language, and expressions, perspective, field of view, or even aesthetic sensibility. All of this can be deconstructed, taught, learned, trained, assimilated, and utilized.
Thank you for your reply. What are your thoughts on scumbling? Do you think its just a technique used to artistically exaggerate as it seems like scumbling isnt really as strongly present in life as represented in most of these old paintings.
I’m going to post an excerpt from week five’s lecture notes from the workshop I teach right here at CGSociety (linked below in my signature), because it addresses your question:
There are two main approaches to brushwork to me. I would describe them as:
The literal approach - The goal is to be as authentic and descriptive of the surface properties and general shapes of the objects as possible, such as using custom brushes to paint the leaves of foliage easily (as shown in this week’s video), texture brushes to paint surfaces of rocks, concrete, dirt, using bristle brushes to paint hair strands, using a soft edge brush to paint fog and clouds, using subtly textured brushes (or customize a scatter setting) to paint pores and pigment variations on skin…etc. This approach is very literal and also very logical, but still artistic and interesting. It’s about matching the brush properties to the surface type and mimicking that surface type as closely as possible within reason, and without having to actually paint in one tiny pore or spec of dirt at a time. This approach requires you to be clever and try different brush settings like scatter, spacing, size jitter, opacity jitter, color jitter…etc. In the analog world, the equivalent would be to sprinkle salt onto still-wet watercolor surface to create textures, or to use impasto to create the illusion of dimension on surface textures, or to stamp a sponge with paint on it to create textures, or scumbling a semi-dry brush to depict dirt and grime…etc.
The abstract approach - This approach could utilize all the techniques and tools of the literal approach, but the goal isn’t necessarily to faithfully reproduce surface properties or object shapes–it’s to simply create visual interest, entertain the audience, and be expressive. The artist might use a textured brush to paint in a particular form shadow on the arm, although the arm isn’t textured like gravel or sand or dirt, but that textured brush creates visual interest in that area and serves its purpose. The artist might use a large indistinct wash to depict the flowing hair of a character, but obviously hair doesn’t look like a diffused pool of pigment wash–it’s an artistic interpretation. Impressionists often use small daubs of broken colors to depict a rich spectrum of vivid and bright colors, but obviously that’s not how surfaces look in real life–it’s a visual effect created by artistic decisions.
In general it’s much harder to assess and critique the abstract approach, because it’s not something logical or concrete–it might be just personal taste. Although you can critique on the artistic quality and the balance of variety of brushwork, or whether painting along or against the form in a particular spot is better, or a particular use of a brush type is very jarring on a particular spot, it’s just a very different mentality compared to the literal approach, which is much easier to critique since it simply has to make sense, be logical and look authentic (but remember, the literal approach is not inherently less artistic–it can be quite creative while still being logical).
Some artworks have brushwork that is almost entirely literal, while some are almost entirely abstract, and then there are all the ranges in-between. So the question that all artists have to ask themselves is, which approach are you taking overall for a painting, and when you lay down this brushstroke at this very moment, are you taking the abstract or the literal approach? Some artworks require a more literal approach, such as very detailed illustrations or concept art, where describing the surface properties and accurate shapes of objects are vital to the visual communication, while some artworks (often fine art) are often done with the abstract approach, making them more artistically expressive. How you choose to balance the two approaches in every artwork is a decision you should try to make early on, because changing your mind later would mean you’d have to repaint a lot of stuff.
I think the reason why some of the painters I have shown in the last few pages are so compelling is because they try to combine both approaches, so that they can “have their cake and eat it too.” It is not an easy feat and that is why only some of the most advanced artists are capable of really pulling it off without the results looking gimmicky or shallow–they really do understand how to balance expressiveness with detail and accuracy.
Now, when you think of scumbling in the context of those two main brushwork approaches, you’ll have to identify how the scumbling is used in the painting, and whether it is a more literal approach that is depicting a specific texture type, or it’s a more abstract approach where the artist is using scumbling just to create visual interest that makes the painting more interesting to look at.