Control and Precision
The complexities of the figure are simplified in Daniel Maidman’s four-question approach.
The complexities of the figure are simplified in Daniel Maidman’s four-question approach
Ipaint in a number of different modes depending on my goal with the painting in question. One of my frequent goals is the vivid depiction of the human figure. To meet the degree of specificity and detail I seek in this type of work, I need a lot of control. To establish that control, I have developed a very precise set of techniques. These techniques are not unique to me, but my own application of them illustrates their use in the creation of the kinds of figures I depict. In this article, I will illustrate the application of my techniques to painting an over-life-size portrait.
Why do I want so much control and precision? Because the figure is so complex. What we directly see of the figure is the skin, but I am also interested in the contributions that bone, muscle and fat make in affecting the skin and defining the superficial forms visible to the eye.
In order to depict the figure in this sense— from surface to core—it is necessary to tackle several questions:
1. How do we depict skin color— in its variation from reddish areas full of superficial capillaries, to yellow areas characterized by subsurface fat deposits? 2. How does skin color interact with light and shadow? 3. How do we depict skin texture— rough and smooth areas?
4. How do we depict skin tension? Some patches of the skin are slack and loose, and other patches stretch over tense underlying structures. If the artist can depict variation in skin tension, he or she can subtly reveal the pattern of muscular contraction and relaxation, which defines the dynamism of a pose. This is very important: the artist can rely on the forms of bulging muscles, but it is easy to overplay this element. Muscle contraction alone does give a figure a sense of action. But if skin tension is part of the artist’s expressive tool set, then the muscles can be shown without overemphasis, and the figure will have not only a sense of action, but a real sense of movement, exertion and life.
I have worked through these questions at length over the course of my work in drawing and painting the figure, both from life and from my own reference photography of the models I work with. As I work repeatedly with an individual model, I find myself developing specialized techniques for that particular model. For the past eight years, I’ve been doing a lot of work with Manou, a professional dancer. Manou is Dutch; her ethnicity and lifestyle result in a distinctive
combination of very pale skin, low body fat and high muscle definition. In painting her, I’ve developed variations of my standard tool set which suit her particular appearance.
I have discovered that
I like to paint Manou in cool bright light, usually with a white background. This somewhat clear, crisp light suits her self-discipline as a dancer, which has sharpened every aspect of her appearance. I start the painting with a cool imprimatur—either light gray or a burnt umber cooled with gray. Then I paint wet-in-to-wet, starting with a layer of relatively more saturated colors corresponding with the basic coloring of different parts of her body—yellows, reds, pinks, even blues. This is how I answer question 1— how do we depict skin color?
I begin by overstating it.
Then I get to question 2—how does light and shadow interact with skin color? Generally at this stage I will layer darks and lights over the higher-chroma layer, still working wet-into-wet. My system of darks and lights is pretty simple—light yellows and whites for lights, and browns, greys and blacks for darks. I’m not a colorist. In fact my lights and darks tend to bleach out a lot of the chroma in my skin-color layer, leaving only hints of color behind. I like it that way; I enjoy brightly-colored paintings, but I wince at overstatement of color in my own work. In a sense, my color theory is derived from that of the great filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky. He felt that life itself was low in color saturation compared with film. Working before digital color correction, he would overlay color and black-and-white prints of his footage, rephotographing each frame to produce new negatives with progressively lower color content, until his films retained only traces of color.
Nearing the end of this stage, I can work on questions 3 and 4—how do we depict skin texture and skin tension? These are closely related. Skin has variable texture. For instance, knees and elbows tend to be rougher than cheeks and foreheads. We perceive texture by means of the character of tiny highlights and shadows on the skin. A lack of tiny local highlights and shadows tells us that skin is smooth (watch out for over blending — it makes skin look like glass or wax). The presence of tiny highlights and shadows, depending on configuration, tells us all we need to know about wrinkles, pores, calluses and so on. So I hash up the paint surface a little bit, reflecting the irregularities of the skin.
Similarly, the character of light on skin tells us how stretched or slack it is. A sharp-edged bright highlight or a sharp shadow wrapping neatly over an underlying form tells us that the skin is stretched tight over bone or muscle. A soft broad highlight or shadow tells us that the skin is soft, and the structure beneath it is also soft. Careful attention to the qualities of highlight and shadow allows the painter to describe surface and underlying structure to the viewer’s eye, moving from macroscopic forms all the way down to texture.
These are some of the main issues I grapple with in painting highly rendered figures. Attention to these issues, and solving them in a way that works for you, will give you a powerful set of tools for using depiction of the human body to express emotions, describe actions and tell stories.