Jessica Crabtree

February 3, 1894: Birth of American painter & illustrator Norman Rockwell

Rockwell is undoubtedly one of America’s most beloved artists. Over his long career as a painter, portrait artist and illustrator, he produced many of the most iconic images of American life. His incredible talent and keen eye for human nature resulted in paintings that were sometimes heartwarming, sometimes provocative, and always outstanding. His role as cover illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post lasted nearly 50 years and produced many of his most outstanding pieces. He died in 1978 leaving over 4,000 original works.

He once said, “Some people have been kind enough to call me a fine artist. I’ve always called myself an illustrator. I’m not sure what the difference is. All I know is that whatever type of work I do, I try to give it my very best. Art has been my life.”
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Making Waves

It turns out the secret of color is all in the waves – light waves, that is. Light, like matter, is made up of tiny particles – but unlike matter these are not atoms or molecules but tiny packets of energy called photons. Oddly, light has a dual nature that makes it behave both like matter (because it is made of particles) and like wave energy, such as vibration or sound. All of the properties of light most familiar to us – including color – come from this wave aspect. All of the colors we see are produced by the varying height and depth of light wavelengths and the speed at which they happen to be traveling.

Human beings have a limited range of perception, so we can only see a narrow range of light energy to interpret as “color.” This range is known as visible light. These colors are arranged in a band known as a spectrum, with each color – just like an FM radio station – sorted by its wavelength and frequency.

Newton and the Prism

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For all its splendor, color is merely an illusion.

Technically, it’s how our brains interpret a narrow range of light wavelengths as reflected by objects based on their atomic properties. However complicated (and unglamorous) that may sound, the artist can take advantage of the fact that color is something we experience and use it to create an intense and powerful method of communication.

Most people tend to think of color as an absolute property – the sky is blue, an apple is red, paper is white, etc. But there is no such thing as a “default color,” because color itself is an optical illusion and the appearance of a given surface varies greatly. No one is more keenly aware of this dilemma – and its potential – than the artist.

Take an eye for example: the white of your eye may properly be white, but it rarely if ever appears so. Under any kind of shadow it will appear gray or blue. (continue reading…)

“The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.” (Eugene Delacroix)

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” (Pablo Picasso)

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” (Edgar Degas)

Today there’s an ocean of photo material available on the internet through open image searches. Some of it is deliberately posted as multi-purpose content, while much of it is gleaned from personal websites by search engines such as Google Images or Bing. In response, there’s a new breed of legal classification for visual/photo art designed to help specify the legal status of a work. A photographer can designate his work under a rights-managed license to specify exactly how much or how little restriction he wishes to place on the use of his photos. This is much more flexible than copyright but is still legally binding. The licenses range in strictness from the traditional “All Rights Reserved” to completely unrestricted “Public Domain.”

The most frequent rights-managed licenses are known as Creative Commons licenses. Most of the photos you see on Flickr or Wikipedia, for example, will be under this kind of license. Anyone who accesses a work under a Creative Commons license can easily find out exactly what level of use is permitted by its author. So if a photographer submits a photo on the web for completely unrestricted use, he licenses it as public domain. If he wants to be given credit in any future use of his photos, he can license it under a Creative Commons Attribution license. He may choose a license which allows any use of his photos except commercial or resale, or a Non-Derivative license, which grants free use but stipulates that the image be unaltered.

Some basic info on Creative Commons licenses:

http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

Periodically look at your painting in a mirror.

An oldie but goodie. This tip is in the same vein as the previous one because it helps you see your painting in a fresh way and draws your attention to problem areas. It’s easy for our eyes to become desensitized to these spots after many hours of work. (I know of an artist who advocates painting with the canvas upside down to combat this – however I’ve never tried it myself!) Flaws in perspective especially will stand out this way.