Màu Sắc và Ánh Sáng - intro

Color and Light

Lời giới thiệu

Quyển sách này khảo sát 2 công cụ cơ bản nhất cho người họa sĩ: Màu Sắc và Ánh Sáng. Nó được dành cho các nghệ sĩ trên tất cả các lĩnh vực đa phương tiện theo cách tiếp cận tat thực truyền thống, cũng như cho tất cả những ai tò mò về các hoạt động của thế giới thị giác.

Introduction

This book examines the painter’s two most fundamental tools: color and light. It is intended for artists of all media interested in a traditional realist approach, as well as for anyone who is curious about the workings of the visual world.

When I was in art school I took a color class that consisted of painting a lot of flat swatches, cutting them out with a sharp knife, and pasting them down into color wheels and gray scales. I spent months learning how to paint perfectly smooth swatches and trying to get the steps between them exactly even.

At the end of each day I would leave the classroom and look up at the colors of the sky, the trees, and the water around me. The sky was not composed of adjacent flat colors, but rather of an infinite variety of gradating hues. Why did dark colors turn blue as they went back toward the horizon—except in a few instances, such as in the painting opposite, when a setting sun casts the far vista in orange light? Why did the leaves have a sharp yellow-green color when the light shined through them, but a gray- green color on top?

In school I was learning how to see and mix color, but I had no idea how to apply this experience to real-world painting problems. Color theory seemed more like a branch of chemistry or mathematics, a separate science that had little to do with making a realistic painting. I felt like a piano student who had played a lot of scales, but had never gotten around to the melody.

If there were answers to my questions about how light interacts with color, atmosphere, water, and other materials,

I would have to find them in fields like physics, optics, physiology, and materials science. I started digging back into art instruction books from more than seventy-five years ago, when it was taken for granted that artists were trying to create an illusion of reality. Artists as far back as Leonardo da Vinci were struggling to explain the behavior of the visual world around them. Each old book had its vein of gold, but the information needed to be translated and updated for our times, and the old theories needed to be tested against recent scientific discoveries.

I investigated recent findings in the field of visual perception and found that many of my assumptions were mistaken, even about such basic things as the primary colors. I learned that the eye is not like a camera, but more like an extension of the brain itself. I learned that moonlight is not blue. It only appears blue because of a trick that our eyes are playing on us.

During the last few years, since the release of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, I have taught workshops at a lot of art schools and movie studios.

I have also kept up a daily blog that explores the methods of the academic painters and the Golden Age illustrators and have adapted some of the blog content into my recent book, Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist. As I assembled that volume, I realized that the information on color and light was so extensive—and so popular with blog readers—that I decided it required a second volume.

This book begins with a survey of historic masters who used color and light in interesting ways. Although those paintings are a tough act to follow, for the rest of the book I’ll use my own paintings— both observational and imaginative—as examples. Since I painted them, I can tell you what I was thinking when I made them. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the various sources of light, and we look at how liaht creates the illusion of three-dimen- sional form. Chapters 4 and 5 cover the basic properties of color as well as an introduction to pigments and paints. Chapters 6 and 7 present the method I use called gamut mapping, which helps in choosing colors for a given picture.

The last chapters of the book deal with specific challenges that we face when we paint textures like hair and foliage, followed by the infinitely varied phenomena of atmospheric effects. The book ends with a glossary, a pigment index, and a bibliography.

This book doesn’t contain recipes for mixing colors or step-by-step painting procedures. My goal is to bridge the gap between abstract theory and practical knowledge. I would like to cut through the confusing and contradictory dogma about color, to test it in the light of science and observation, and to place it in your hands so that you can use it for your own artistic purposes. Whether you work in paint or pixels, fact or fantasy, I want this book to bring color and light down to earth for you.