Monday 13 October 2014

Painting by numbers

The college has been approached by someone from the BBC researching for a programme on 'Painting by Numbers'. You might think this is some sort of child’s play nonsense for CBC but painting by numbers goes back a long way and has embedded within it a series of very important issues.
A very short history:  
Painting by numbers kits were first issued for the general public in the 1950s, and were designed by Max S. Klein, an engineer and owner of the Palmer Paint Company of Detroit, Michigan and Dan Robbins, a commercial artist. At the time they were very contentious, on the one hand they were hailed as allowing everyone access to the ability to paint realistic paintings, on the other hand they were derided as childish.
But…
There are some things you might want to consider before dismissing these 1950s kits as worthless.
The breaking down of forms into simple flat colour areas has a long and honorable history. Roman mosaics for instance were first of all sketched out as line drawings and then filled in by coloured mosaic tiles. At the dawn of the Renaissance Giotto was developing classic fresco techniques which consisted of breaking down images into simple line drawings, having these drawings converted into ‘cartoons’ which when used to apply simple drawings onto wet plaster, operated as guides to the fresco painter, who because you cant mix ‘buon’ or true fresco paint, but simply apply it flat onto the wet plaster with which it bonds, had to learn how to paint flat sections that would appear to the eye as solid.
Giotto 

A how to do it wiki which is basic but pretty accurate is to be found here
If course Giotto also used fresco secco (dry plaster painting techniques that allow you blend colour, as well as working in the golden hour introduced in the wiki link)
During the 19th century there were several technical developments in colour science that had a significant effect on artists. Probably the most important was the work done by the French colour theorist Chevreul. In particular his law of the simultaneous contrast of colours and his use of colour wheels to explain how and why this worked. See this link
 His work was initially for textiles manufacturers but the implications for artists were clear. You needed to think about how colour would optically blend and this had great consequences for artists who had been working with what is often called ‘local’ colour. Try to read the pdf download as well as ‘Seurat and the Science of Painting’ by William Innes Homer both of which are very good guides to what was going on in painting at the time and complement each other. 
The outcome was that artists started to understand how small patches of colour could be applied in such a way that effective ‘plain air’ images could be made, these ideas of course influenced Impressionism, Post-Impressionism , Pointillism and Divisionism.
The other scientific advance to revolutionise how artists would use colour was the Munsell colour system. This was a spatial colour system, using the three colour dimensions of hue, tone and chroma. (Munsell used value for tone, hence tonal value and we often use saturation for chroma, or colour purity) 
Most importantly Munsell was the first person to provide illustrations of colours in three-dimensional space.
A slice through Munsell's colour system

The control of colour could now be achieved by a combination of the way light acted as a colour and how pigment could be mixed in relation to an understanding of placement within a three dimensional set of co-ordinates. These co-ordinates also allowed the colour industry to develop a number system whereby colours could be identified. The Munsell company still exist and has a very good website that deals with ongoing issues surrounding colour as both a pigment and light phenomena.
I put up a post a few weeks back about Louise Lawler’s tracings and pointed out that she employed a children’s book illustrator to make these. See
The issue was that she needed a professional to do these tracings because tracing is no job for an amateur. This is why the Palmer Paint Company needed the skills of Dan Robbins, a commercial artist. He was doing a similar job to the children’s book illustrator working for Lawler.
So why is this job so difficult? Try and trace around a photograph and convert it into a series of convincing flat shapes that still look three dimensional when you remove the tracing from the photograph. It is much harder than it seems and it only works if you already have a strong grasp of form. If you have this you begin to design your selections so that they add up to make convincing ‘solid’ forms. If the image has to be then ‘toned’ a different selection is needed and if coloured in a further refinement is required.
Hopefully you can see from this potted history there is more to ‘painting by numbers’ than you might at first think, which is why this post is going up.
Finally the researcher has suggested that students might like to get involved. If so let me know and we can look at the issues concerned in a bit more depth and perhaps try making some ‘painting by numbers’ drawings.

PS an ex LCA member of staff is quite central to the history of how painting by numbers was taken up by post-pop artists. See Willem Volkers' website

See also:

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