Gurney Journey

A zograscope is an optical device with a large lens that enhances the impression of three-dimensional depth in a flat image.

"Some artists from the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age painting, like Pieter Janssens Elinga and Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten created a type of peep shows with an illusion of depth perception by manipulating the perspective of the view seen inside, usually the interior of a room. From around 1700 many of such "perspective boxes" or "optica" had a bi-convex lens with a large diameter and small dioptre for an exaggerated perspective, giving a stronger illusion of depth. Most pictures showed architectural and topographical subjects with linear perspectives."

Engraved views with enhanced perspective called vue d'optiques were created for this purpose.

 

 Christopher Leith Evans website

"The lower vanishing point is located in a vertical that passes through the vertical lines of the picture quite near its left edge."

From American Artist Magazine, March 1951.

Books

The Frank Reilly School of Art (about Frank Reilly's teaching)
The Student's Guide to Painting by Jack Faragasso (student of Frank Reilly)

Anna Airy, Verdure and Decay, watercolour

In a recent post I featured Anna Airy, who documented the factories in World War I.

She also wrote an instructional book called "Making a Start in Art."
Here are some excerpts:


"You will find, by holding up your pencil or brush horizontally on a level with your eyes and extending it forward to arm's length, a mental horizontal line across your view. The boundaries of your picture having been decided by framing it with your hands, translate that mental observation into an actual light pencil line right across your paper, the eye level, and mark it E.L."

Don't touch wet watercolour
"Do not touch wet watercolour—wait. However bad it looks when wet, it will not look so bad dry and you will get over the trouble more easily."

Half-closing the eyes
"It is very helpful to half-close your eyes every now and then when working; look through the lashes; this partially shuts out for the moment masses of detail that may be worrying you. This is not done with the idea that the detail may be left out to avoid trouble, but to let you see how subservient is that intricate detail to the picture seen as a whole."

Keeping things in proportion
"Do not be led away into making a lot of little measurements, each of which is in all probability a little wrong (and error multiplies): run your eye over your subject as a whole and take note of the proportion of big things to one another, remembering that the greater is bound to contain the less, so that if you get your few big proportions roughly correct, all the smaller objects will fall into their places without much difficulty."

Should we ignore detail?
"Never say, 'Oh! I don't see detail' and 'The detail doesn't matter.'"

How to paint a background around a complicated shape in watercolour
"Take a good brushful of the background colour and go carefully round your difficult flower petals first, leaving a real wet track. It will not dry in a hurry; if you wanted it to you would have to wait a long time! Then start your background wash at the top as you have done in previous examples, and continue it down until it meets the already wet colour round the flowers. When the washes meet you will have more wet colour than you want round the flower petals; take the squeezed-out brush, as before, and very lightly remove some: the remaining wet colour will probably settle itself quite comfortably. You must be neat-handed and careful! Or you can remove the extra moisture with a little corner of blotting paper, like taking off ink blots. Or you may effect the whole process by turning the work upside down."


Assorted thoughts
• "Our business is to be the eyes and the brain for other sorts of people."
• "Key your picture from its highest light, which we will assume to be, as it so often really is, the sky.
• "Don't look at the thing you're painting, look just beside it." (Attributed to James J. Shannon)
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Book on Amazon: Making a Start in Art
Previously: Anna Airy's Industrial Art

To keep all those gently sloping lines in relationship to each other, I drew a grid of preliminary guidelines, starting with the eye level (which runs through the middle of the shop windows).

The other key foundational line is the line at the top of the building. You can still see that light guideline near the top of the cornice of the Bauer building. The intermediate lines of the facade are interpolated between those two lines.


When composing a picture with a storefront or any architecture, one choice that you have to make early on is whether to paint it straight-on in one point perspective (where all the horizontals of the facade stay horizontal), or whether to introduce some convergence.
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Previously on GJ: Perspective Tip

I choose a limited palette of gouache: purple, lemon yellow, white, and two shades of raw umber. (Raw umber varies a lot by brand; the Shinhan is really more of a raw sienna). I add vermilion later on as an accent color.

Rackstraw Downes, "At the Confluence of Two Ditches Bordering a Field with Four Radio Towers" (1995), 46 x 48 in.

Rackstraw Downes (born 1939) has an interesting approach to perspective which often results in unexpected twisting of the lines in the scene, such as the way the catenary curves of the power lines above are conveyed with compound curves.

Downes points out that the early perspective theorists offered two competing ideas for how to translate the 3D world onto a 2D surface. One is the familiar straight-line perspective codified by Leon Battista Alberti in the early 1400s.

Jean Fouquet, Arrival of Emperor Charles IV... 1455-1460.

Around the same time, other artists explored a way to interpret perspective using curving lines. But curved-space perspective mostly fell out of favor for centuries, until recently.

360-degree panorama. Photo: Heiwa 4126

Curved space projections look familiar to us now, thanks to wide angle lenses and the rotating cameras that can capture a 360-degree field of view.

In many of his paintings, Downes uses a curvilinear perspective that's reminiscent of these photographic approaches. The painting below takes in more than 90 degrees. 

This diagram comes from the Famous Artists Course. The instructors recommend constructing a transparent box around the lamp to help get the ellipses right. The eye level (or horizon) in this diagram is up at the top of the image, where the lines vanish to a dot. The square cross sections can be subdivided to find the center line, center points, and the square-in-perspective on which each ellipse can be fitted.

A circle at the height of the eye level would be seen perfectly edge-on, and would thus be a straight line.



The same principle applies to ellipses above the horizon. When I drew this round tower, I first established the eye level. It's near the bottom of the small arch-top window in the middle of the picture.

At that level the ellipse flattens to a straight line. I drew the other ellipses becoming progressively fuller as we approach the main ellipse of of the tower's roofline. Having those lightly drawn ellipses in my preliminary drawing helped me place the windows and the courses of stonework.
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Check out my Instagram page, where I'm sharing theme park sketches.