The Virtues of Realistic Painting

Leo von Klenze, View of the Valhalla near Regensburg.

My interest in painting and drawing started when my mother bought me an encyclopedia that included a short but excellent course in drawing and perspective and an expensive section about the history of art. I remember spending many afternoons after school trying to understand applied geometry to decipher the instructions to do drawings of stairs, columns and cubes in two-point perspective. I can also remember sanding pieces of wood to attempt my first miniature paintings with my inexpensive Tempera set. Years later, I moved to San Salvador, there while I studied English, I learned classic art methods with a few Salvadorian painters. In particular I enjoyed studying the techniques mastered by painters of the German romantic landscape period. Among the best of them are Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839), Carl Fohr (1795-1818), Carl Rottmann (1797-1850), August Matthias Hagen (1794-1878), and specially Leo van Klenze (1784-1864) whose paintings exhibit a richness of detail and special attention to light and compositional space.

Ludwig Knaus, Girl in a field.

The German romantic landscape imbued philosophical ideas that go beyond the process of creating art. In a way they saw themselves as mediators between God and mankind, therefore one needed to have a religious inclination and divine inspiration as a prerequisites for producing art of true value. They were in opposition to the sweeping currents of rationality, art and intellectual development such as the Enlightenment. You can see in their paintings the reverence they felt for the creation. What characterized the German romantic landscape painting process? I could mention: outstanding draughtsmanship, all the elements of the painting fuse in light and space to become a unified realistic view of the world, and their ability to render architectural elements in harmony with natural forms.

Joseph Anton Koch, Monastery of San Francesco di Civitella.

The German romantic movement searched for, as several other romantics movements in Europe at that time, the ultimate goal of the artist, to create a personal representation of what is beautiful through mastering the technical difficulties and limitations of pigment based painting.

Jenne Farm, Reading, Vt

One of the most difficult things to achieve in landscape painting is the accurate rendition of light. This problems is akin to finding the correct combination of tone and color that evokes the artist's view of nature. Thus artwork is seen, not as an approximation to a photograph but as an personalized, filtered view of the intrinsic beauty of nature. In this way the artist displays his talent for sharp observation with an equal and complementary ability to improve upon the natural world by rearranging and enhancing it.

Here at the bottom, I have included the completed artwork I started in the previous post, so you could see my attempts to render a sunny day in the countryside using a photo of Jenne Farm located in Reading, Vt.

The Tools to Make Art

In this post I will give you a more detailed description of the tools I use for creating conceptual artwork which, in time, may become a complete studio work rendered in traditional media such as oil, acrylic inks, color pencils and watercolor.

Notan of the Color Image Below

Color Blocking Stage of a Painting

Digital Tool
HP PC with Vista Home Premium (64-bit). Running on a 5MB of memory. I work in front of a 22-inch diagonal display that is always set to 32-bit mode. All my line and color rendering is done with a Wacom Intuos 6 x11-inch tablet. Sometimes I use my HP CanoScan 90 to scan handmade drawings and to create new textures. For storing my digital files I use a 1 TB external hard drive.

Now to the digital painting software. As you know, because of the incompatibilities created by Windows Vista, many of the plugins in Adobe Photoshop, are not ready to run in 64-bit native mode. This has made it necessary for me to install Photoshop CS3 & CS5. I also use Nikon Capture NX2 and Corel Painter 11 for fine tuning the artwork.

Photoshop Workflow
I like to divide my workflow in terms of the creative stages in the painting. First I open Photoshop CS5 (64-bit) where I usually start with masses of dark color (the meta language of notan) and switch to textures brushes to establish mood and anchoring tones. Here I resolve most of the color problems of the painting using the ColoRotate and MagicPicker plugins.

Corel Painter 11 Texturing

New York Central Park

With Painter 11, I usually render the texture and background colors with a specific type of brush, such as Digital Watercolor, and proceed to establish the masses of color that will remain the underlying structure of the painting. In the example shown, you can see the watercolor texture in the background buildings. After this stage I prefer to switch to Photoshop CS5 to work in the critical stages of the painting.

Capture NX2 Fine Tuning
I use Capture NX2 in the final stages of the painting. At this point I am more interested in the global impact of the subject and if the elements "read" correctly. Here I adjust color, contrast levels and sharpness among other things.

Finally, I resize the file using Fractal Printer Pro v5 or Alien Skin Blow Up v2, for display on the web or for printing. If you have a comment or a question email me at carlosherrera700@gmail.com.

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Using Photoshop's Lasso Tool and Brushes

Here is an example of how a simple rock study can become a more complete digital painting in about 2 hours. The color palette is very limited and subdued.

Initially my plan was to find out how quickly I could paint realistic organic textures and forms using the Lasso tool and Brushes in Photoshop CS5 and document how limitations of this method can be overcome. This is the plan I fallowed:

1. Find photo references that showed rock forms under overcast light. As you know overcast light allows to see greater tonal range and consequently to render a better description of the form.

2. Concentrate on large color masses to establish the abstract structure (Notan) of the painting.

3. Use the fewest lines possible and go directly to the lasso tool to isolate areas of similar tonal value and work with brushes on producing organic textures and airbrushed backgrounds.

Here how the painting session actually went. First I opened Photoshop CS3 and created a new 8x10" document at 72 dpi with white background. I traced with a dark brown brush the basic outlines of the rocks and proceeded to create selections with the lasso tool. Notice how the lasso selection leaves sharp edges. These can be controlled by refining the selection and using the Smodge tool. I used the same steps to create the tonal range in the gray sky that gradually blended into the mountains and valley in the right side of the painting.

I think this method is surprisingly effective and fast. It allowed me to quickly determine if the basic color palette would work and also to make sure that the tonal values followed the rules of atmospheric perspective .

After working with the main masses in the tree and the valley on the right, I increased the resolution to 150dpi and cropped the file with Genuine Fractal PrintPro-the version 5 I have only works in CS3. This is an excellent tool to achieve both the final resolution and dimensions of your artwork. Then I opened the file in PS CS5 and continued to add details until I got the results you see here. Digital painting allows you to test different options and possibilities in a very short time. Try it!