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GALLERIES —
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5 - HIGHLIGHT
AND SHADOW |
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7 - THE LAST
DETAIL |
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With the end in sight, a myriad of details present themselves in the final lap. |
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I again resurrect my trusty, completely frizzed out badger blender with the broken and retaped ferrule to gingerly apply random flyspeck-sized Terra Rosa rust spot pits on the chromed surface of the mascot. Then I also worked back into the too-dominant splotches with Payne's Gray, which I will also do with the rust stains on the hood. A little bit of extra attention went into detailing the face, hair, and wing shoulders of the hood mascot with the same palette of colors used all along, since that is where I most emphatically want the viewer's eye to perceive detail. |
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The eye and camera lens share a similar attribute — depth of field. Visual clarity occurs at the focal length. Things too far in front or behind that are out-of-focus. Since an oil painting is a flat two-dimensional plane, any depth of field is contrived by a combination of perspective linearity, color and achromatic contrasts, and detail or the lack thereof. Some realists make everything in their paintings sharp-edged clear but reality is more blur than clarity. After all, human vision can only focus on a very small physical area, almost a point. In normal reality, all else is in the periphery where visual coherence ranges from out-of-focus to downright distorted. |
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All the vivid rust smears are toned down to a more realistic level by smudging over them with Jaune-Flake fingerprints. It's neither important nor necessarily desirable that this overcoat match the hood perfectly. I did some ragged linework near the topside of the peeling finish blotches with the same mixture laden with a double measure of Flake White. This creates the illusion of ruptured paint chips peeling up from the hood and visually lifts these details off the field surface of the painting. I further enhanced the contrast by using some barely thinned Payne's Gray to create dark corrosion pits within the Terra Rosa rust spots underneath the chips. This final phase involves flitting from one detail to the next across the entire panel and sprucing up all that seems even a bit raw. Flake or Tit White worked over some of the sharper highlight streaks on the binocs and selected final patches of Payne's Gray reinforce the illusion of contoured surfaces. One last set of Payne's Gray strokes on the strap covers the too-evident Cobalt Violet and deeply darkens the appearance of the braided synthetic threads to near blackness. |
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Further detailing too minor to mention followed during the last couple of slow hours in front of the easel. All that really remains is The Last Detail. |
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5 - HIGHLIGHT
AND SHADOW |
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7 - THE LAST
DETAIL |
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