Building Your Personal Style (Feb. 2014) | Part 2 Bill Perkins

Notes Outline

• Intimidating and complex subject of building your styles
• fundamentals of primary elements throughout history
• major and minor keys
• how to create clarity in your work
• evaluate his own personal work and explain why he made those decisions.

Chapter 2

BP goes through a series of paintings and how they use the concepts of flat mass (notan) or form, light and shadow (chiaroscouro), etc.

In order periods the line and texture become dominant in various periods.

There was a reason artists like Monet and Manet have flatter images than previous artists.

An influx of japanese block prints caused those artists to rebel or make more mass (notan) compositions.

On Sargent - he sets up his image on Notan and then delivers form where he wants you to look.

There are no absolutes in here. There's only some of the important concepts that are repeated throughout history.

Arranged by concepts

Workshop Activity

Grab from a variety of artists you like - you have the PDFs for a variety of those. And study them as well as try to identify if they are mass/notan or form/chiaroscuro and line/texture.

How to create a bad image Not being deliberate on whether you are laying down your shape, form, etc. If you combine line, mass and form without distinction, you get a design mud.

Chapter 3

BP starts analyzing a Norman Rockwell. You gotta be clear with the ideas and design choices you are making.

Workshop Activities Idea

Do some figure drawing, think and write of how you'd tackle the figure first.

Discussion on Value System

We have two ways to measure: the major key and minor key.

Your Major Key is the larger amount of your image that is comprised light, medium or dark - or could also be comprised of a color.

Your Minor Key is the range of contrast between your image.

Understanding this two concepts and measuring or referencing these values, you can manage the mood of the image. For example a happy image, you can do a high major key light, and high minor key for contrast. If you want to do a dreamlike setting, you can do middle major key and moderate to low contrast for minor key. For a scary image, you can do a dark major key and a moderate or high minor key for contrast.

10:30 minutes

Tone is a strong visual component.

resume tomorrow

Thickness of the neck

However you represent the head, whether it is relatively simply yet characteristic, or incredibly refined, you can now identify the start of the neck from the chin. The digastric plane is the bottom plane, it gives the head thickness. It will be useful when drawing the head from other angles - the biggest hurdles is working in a flat 2d plane while seeking to depict volume.

The gesture from the chin to the bottom of the neck is curved and downward. It is better to make the neck a little too long than too short. You then come from the bottom of the skull, the key here will be not to make the back of the neck too skinny.

Notice that the neck starts very low in the front and very high in the back. Think of your shirt collars, it sits high in the back and low at the front.

bloom's taxonomy