Plein Airpril 2019 (Patreon)

Hi friends! How are y'all doing this week? Sorry this is an old one, but it was a really fun project that I did a few years ago. It was quite challenging but I learned a lot from it and wanted to share it with you all!

Similar to the Inktober challenge, the idea is that for every day of the month of April, to draw/paint something en plein air. It's obviously meant to be done outside, but I was too lazy to do that LOL so I just painted from my window. (And obviously did not do the whole month... But that's a post for another day.)

Plein air painting is a really tricky thing because obviously the environment changes so quickly, from the amount/direction of light, to wind in foliage, and all that other fun stuff. You end up having to paint really, really fast, and barely have time to even pick the proper colours. So there are mainly three things that normally would take up a lot of time, being squashed into a much shorter time frame.

Lighting (Values)

Especially when it comes to the "golden hours" of sunrise/sunset/dusk/twilight/dawn/whatever, this period is extremely shortened and there is almost NO time to think about this. 

Basically for me, the process goes from observe ➡ analyze ➡ paint to simply observe ➡ paint. No analysis in the moment -- only afterwards. At least, I try to analyze after the fact. So the learnings do still happen, just at a different point in the process!

Colours (Hues)

Even for non-"artists" (I believe that everybody can be an artist -- post about this forthcoming!), colour picking is DAMN. HARD. Like, so damn hard that they even have games to help improve those skills. The difficulty becomes especially noticeable when you look at things in very specific lighting situations (such as a sunset, which was when I decided to do most of my paints because apparently I like pain?). 

Remember The Dress? The reason people saw it as either blue/black or white/gold was precisely because of the way that their respective brains had been primed to perceive hues/colours with respect to the surrounding lighting and environment, not exclusive from it!

Proportions & Perspective

For the life of me, I can't remember exactly where I learned this, but I believe one of the defining differences that marked the shift from the more classical art periods (Baroque, Gothic, etc.) to the Renaissance was the fact that the artists learned how to represent 3D perspective in a 2D medium. 

Think of some of the really really really old artworks you've seen in museums -- they typically looked kind of "flat". Kids do this too (myself included) -- they tend to draw things from a "straight-on" view and everything is usually comprised of circles and rectangles. Of course, the world we live in is 3D; we are actually comprised of spheres and boxes and cones and all sorts of other 3D shapes. It's basically like going from the graphics on the original NES to a modern PS5 (oh hey, look at my gamey-gamer knowledge).

Now, take that concept and apply it to what you actually see in front of you. While you can still perceive most things with one eye because the brain does a lot of ~*magic*~ with what enters your retinas, usually perception in 3D with two retinas is processed differently. I won't go into the science of that because I don't know enough about it, but simply try looking at something with one eye closed, then the other eye closed, then with eyes crossed, etc. The same object at the same distance will look like it's at a different angle or in a different spot in all these scenarios. The brain does a LOT of very fast short-cut-making and processing for us to see 'normally', developed over millennia of evolution. 

When it comes to depth perception and/or perspective, usually we know instinctually how 'far away' something is, but putting it down to 2D takes then another set of processing neural connections that we can't always expend while working this fast! The jump from "drawing what you THINK you see" to "drawing what you ACTUALLY see" is, IMHO, actually the biggest hurdle in improving artistic abilities. In other words, drawing is actually 90% observing, 10% drawing.

----------

For most of these, I aimed to finish within 15 minutes, and even then, pretty much everything about the environment had changed already by the end. The ultimate in "no undo button" I guess LOL.

Anyway, here is the collection of those paintings that I did back in 2019! They should roughly be in chronological order but I'm awful at naming files so who's to say. 🙃 I'm also putting together the time-lapses as a compilation video so keep an eye out for that!

P.S. Last one looks so different because it was actually done from an airport lounge. Remember when air travel used to be a thing?!