Butterfly Garden Demo

by
Armand Cabrera




The images for this article are from one of my demos at the Acadia Workshop I taught out near Bass Harbor. I demo everyday in my workshops so the students can see how I solve problems not just hear me talk about it.
Gail Ribas the owner of Acadia Workshops has a great venue and the locations are all beautiful. She has a big well lit studio for inclement days. We had a class of 9 students. We’ve scheduled another class   for next fall, Sept 19-23 and I already have a couple of students planning to be there.

For me, the trip was a dream come true, on the way up I stayed in Gloucester for two nights near Rocky Neck. I had perfect weather and got a painting in the one full day I was there. I visited the Cape Ann Museum and and got some pictures of motiff number one in Rockport so I can do my painting of it at a later date.
 Stapleton Kearns was very helpful suggesting places to visit. Once in Maine I actually got to meet Stapleton one evening after my class and he let me hang out with him and his group while they were painting in Acadia Park.


This demo is from Charlotte Rhoades Park in Southwest Harbor five minutes from the workshop center.I want to thank Wyn Easton for taking these photos of me during the painting process. Diane is always after me to photograph my demos but I can demo and talk or demo and photograph but I can't demo, talk and photograph at the same time.

The garden club has a beautiful butterfly garden in full bloom and I always find it a treat to paint. The challenge is to not get lost in too much detail and preserve the big divisions of light and shadow in the scene. This kind of motif can easily be distracting because of all of the saturated color and lack of solid forms.

I spent a few minutes observing and deciding what I was going to move around for my painting and how I would place the elements I wanted in the image.

I started with a simple contour drawing of the big masses as I saw them.

I then blocked in the average shadows being sensitive to hue changes for the different plants and shrubs.

I continue to block all the big shapes in preserving their relative brightness to sun and shadow.

At the very last stages of the painting I refine shapes, adjust values and add the flowers and some detail being careful not to lose the lights. The biggest mistake I see people make painting scenes like this is they get confused by the blooms and fail to preserve their sense of light.

The finished painting 'Butterfly Garden' 12x16 oil on linen painting time two hours.

Variety in Painting

by

Armand Cabrera

Artists are always asking about how to improve their painting. I think one of the best things an artist can do to improve is become aware of the variety in everything they paint.

Variety creates interest it can be used to move the eye through a painting and its complexity is endless. To see variety you must make yourself aware of the differences between pictorial elements that share similar traits but have a unique quality that creates their individuality. A successful artist can reveal subtle differences that most people over look.

Variety can be created in a number of ways within your image, you can vary the size (contour, height and width) of elements in your scene you can vary their coloring or their angle or spacing to each other. All of these changes add interest and they can be designed into the painting once an artist learns to see them.

Variety can also be added through brushwork and surface quality. Some passages can be painted thinly some with thicker paint. The calligraphy of the brushstrokes can be varied so no two are the same in direction or size.

Edges are another area that gives an artist many opportunities for variety. Edges can be soft or hard optically or they can be physically blended or left sharp and unblended.

Adding this kind of interest insures the painting has lasting appeal beyond the attention of the image itself. Although the subject matter in the image is what draws many people to a particular painting eventually it is the structure and handling of the painting that gives a work power and separates it from current fads or cliché. It is the strength of the design that allows it to stand the test of time.

All paintings for this article by Willard Leroy Metcalf

Andrew Loomis Quotes on Color

by Armand Cabrera

Andrew Loomis was a successful illustrator and a teacher at the Chicago Art Institute. He studied at the Art Students League of New York under George Bridgman and Frank Vincent DuMond. He wrote some of the most successful art instruction books ever printed. His six books are a wealth of information for the aspiring artist or illustrator. In print for almost fifty years they were Fun with a Pencil, Figure Drawing for all its worth, Creative Illustration, Successful Drawing, Drawing the Head and Hands and Eye of the Painter. Of the six books he wrote only Creative Illustration and Eye of the Painter deal directly with painting and color. The following quotes are from those two books.

If color is also subject to the natural laws of tone, light and shadow then the only pictorial approach to color which can be of any real value must incorporate these principles.

A color cannot be right until its value is right

No color can be made brighter than its full strength

A color is relative first to the amount of light shining upon it which gives its lightness or darkness

Color is relative to all surrounding color influence

The larger the area the softer the color

All color becomes a source of reflected color when in light and will reflect themselves into lesser light

All color in shadow become recipients of reflected color and will change accordingly

Any two colors will be harmonious when one or both contain some of the other

The local color should never completely lose its identity in the shadow

No color in the shadow can have brighter color intensity than the same color would have in the light.

All colors in their greatest intensity or tints of the pure color should be relegated to the lights and halftones. When reaching the shadows these colors are reduced or grayed, or the color is changed by influence of other color reflecting into the shadow.

The halftones may contain the most brilliant and pure color

Keep your color most intense on the edges of the lighted areas, where it merges into shadow.

We cannot paint nature from a tube or a pot.

The greatest mistake in color, and one that causes lack of unity and harmony, is having too many colors on the palette.

Bibliography

Creative Illustration
Andrew Loomis
Viking Pres 1947

Eye of the Painter
Andrew Loomis
Viking Press 1961

Andrew Loomis Quotes on Drawing and Tone

by
Armand Cabrera

Andrew Loomis wrote his first two books on drawing as opposed to painting. This was no accident as he understood good drawing the necessary foundation for good realist painting. Fun with a Pencil was written for anyone interested in drawing and its light approach to the subject matter doesn't detract from the great foundational principals laid out in its pages. Figure Drawing For All its Worth focuses on the figure as no other book has since it came out in 1943. It is the bible for comic book artists, animators and illustrators. Anyone interested in painting the figure should own this book its information is as relevant today as it was when first written. The following are excerpts on drawing and tone.

The way you draw characterizes your work. It is one of the chief means of identification, and has positive value for you and for no one else. For this reason, if for no other, it is foolish to allow another artists style of drawing to influence you too much. Drawing continually from photographs can be equally bad. If you draw from life the chances are that your work will contain much more individuality than it ever will if you use readymade drawings or paintings from which proportions can be traced or copied.

When sketching from life the most practical way is to hold the pencil at arm’s length and by sighting locate the middle point of your subject, both up and down and across. Approximate a rectangle the subject will fit into.

When artists begin to compile and set down their combined experience, give freely and humbly what little they can add, as do other sciences, then art may have some chance to re-establish itself in the hearts of everyday people- even against the mechanical perfection of the camera; even in a period of social adjustment and financial depression.

I can think of no field of endeavor so sadly lacking in simple organization of its working principles. Nothing quite so haphazard, hit-or-miss, as the whole field of artistic endeavor.

Good drawing begins with a search for basic forms

No one can successfully draw or paint a head until they can render the surface of a sphere in light.

With the basic forms established, we can then build on the surface forms.

Since only light can define form, we must study carefully what the light does as it travels across the surfaces, noting the areas of light halftone and shadow.

As the form turns away from the light it produces halftone and shadow. The lightness or darkness of the halftone is the result of the angle of the plane in relation to the direction of the light.

Shadows occur only when the light cannot reach the plane.

Value relationships between objects produce design.

It is design and arrangement that make pictures, regardless of subject.

There are four essential properties of tone: Intensity of light in relation to shadow, Relationship of value to all adjacent tones, Identification of the nature and quality of light, Incorporation of the influence of reflected light.

The five ‘P’s of good drawing: proportion, placement, perspective, planes, and pattern

Tone and harmony come first.

The study of still life is one of the best ways of learning to draw.

Do not interpret me as advising you not to draw from life or nature. Nature is a great storehouse of material. By all means draw from that great source. Do not just copy. “Build” with what you observe for yourself to be true. Try to get the individual quality of each thing you draw. It is that quality that makes the artist interesting.

William Andrew Loomis

by Armand Cabrera

William Andrew Loomis was born in 1892 in Syracuse New York. His family moved to Zanesville Ohio and Loomis returned to New York city to go to art school at the age of 19. He studied under George Bridgman and Frank Vincent DuMond at the Art Students League. At the age of 23 he moved back to the Midwest to Chicago to work making streetcar posters for the Street Railways Advertising Company.

In April of 1917 the United States entered World War 1 by declaring war on Germany. Loomis enlisted in the Army and served 20 months with the US Army Engineering Corps, serving ten months in France. In 1919 Loomis married Ethel Olson and the couple had four children together.

After the war Loomis returned to Chicago to work for The Charles Everett Johnson Advertising Art Studio followed by Bertch and Cooper Studio. Eventually Loomis opened his own studio in 1922, working in editorial and advertising for most of the top clients of the time including Kellogg’s, Coca Cola, Lucky Strike, Palmolive Soap, Ladies Home Journal, The Post, Redbook and Life magazine. While on a trip to Hawaii the Loomis passed through Southern California and decided to move there in 1938.

As successful as Loomis was as an illustrator it was his books on illustration and art that he is remembered for today. The six books are Fun With A Pencil 1939, Figure Drawing For All Its Worth 1943, Creative Illustration 1947, Successful Drawing 1951(and its revised edition 3-Dimensional Drawing), Drawing The Head And Hands 1956 and Eye Of The Painter 1961(finished by his wife and published two years after his death in 1959).

Comic book artists, illustrators and anyone interested in a career in art bought his books and kept most of them in print for over fifty years. Literally generations of artists have sought the knowledge he wrote down in these important books and their effect cannot be ignored. For me, when I found out about them in the late seventies these books were the only information on painting and drawing realistically available for serious students. Out of print at that time, these books were like the Holy Grail and before the internet you had to hunt them down in used books stores to find them. I can still tell you where I was when I found each copy I own. Here was real information, not some gimmicky writing on how to paint trees or flowers. These books taught the fundamentals of picture making and were written by a master in his field.

Hopefully Loomis will be given the proper respect for his art and writing at some point and a monograph will be created featuring his beautiful paintings.

Bibliography

The Illustrator in America 1860-2000
Walt Reed
The society of Illustrators 2001

The Eye of the Painter and the Elements of Beauty
Andrew Loomis
Viking Press 1961

William Andrew Loomis A Legacy in Words and Pictures
Jack and Jennifer Harris
Illustration Magazine Issue 20 Fall 2007

Quote

Talent is really a capacity for a certain type of learning of knowledge and a consuming interest in the facts that contribute to that knowledge~ Andrew Loomis