Artists Magazine - USA (2020-01 & 2020-02)

38 Artists Magazine January/February 2020

Build ART HACKS

Crowd Sourcing

Attempting to capture throngs of people with your pen or

brush can be intimidating. The solution is to avoid details:

● Think “carrot”: Artist Frank Clarke describes

his figures as upright carrots with the stem as

a figure’s head. Totally weird—totally works.

● Stick ’em: Practice making stick figures in

various positions using your paintbrush. If the

figures are on the move, their arms are likely to

be in motion, too, and their feet won’t be flat

on the ground—so work the angles for those limbs. Forget

the feet of distant figures.

● Stagger: A crowd of figures in the distance can be handled

as an abstract wash with a few animating lines sketched in.

Add a bit more detail to the distant figures closest to you,

and they’ll stand in for the whole group.

On the Level

Streets can be level or sloped upward or downward. Take this

into account when depicting figures:

Is the street level? The heads of all the people will generally

line up on a single horizon line; the size of the figures indicate

how close or far away they are.

Does the street slope up and away? Closer figures should

be bigger and lower on the picture plane than figures that are

farther away.

Are you looking down? Then you have some distortion to

deal with. Figures will be severely foreshortened. Mostly,

you’ll see the tops of their heads, and you’ll need to

compress the limbs and body length.

Taking in the Skyline

Cities worldwide are famous for their skylines—and visitors

often look for artistic souvenirs of these iconic views. Here’s

how to give them what they want:

● Avoid monotonous-looking architecture by varying your

mark-making. Use different-sized grid marks for a sense

of structure, dots and dashes for building ornamentation,

long vertical lines to emphasize height, heavy horizontal

lines to show off corners, and nested squares and cube

shapes to build visual variety.

● For a skyline with its reflection in a body of water, paint

your whole surface as if it were folded at the horizon line.

Whatever you show in the top area should also be seen as

a reflection in the lower area.

● The lower the horizon line, the more dramatic your city

appears. The higher your horizon line, the more likely the

skyline will be a background to a foreground narrative.

● Nighttime skylines and cityscapes don’t equate with

colorless scenes. Grays, blacks and highlights are fine for

concrete or asphalt, but underlying or reflected colors and

metallic gleams are usually also discernable.

Tree Time

When depicting trees in the city, consider the following:

● City trees are usually cordoned off with decorative fencing

or a border at the base.

● Different trees have different overall shapes—round,

conical and so forth—and

urban trees tend to be more

groomed and shaped than

their brethren in the wild.

● Take inspiration from

Claude Monet’s Boulevard

des Capucines (at right; oil

on canvas, 31⅝x23¾). The

denuded limbs of these

winter trees are lovely with

their browns, purples, grays

and yellows blurring against

the architectural facades and

distantlandscape.

About the Town

Make the city scene with these pointers.

—COURTNEY JORDAN

READER HACK

“I use disposable cake decorating bags and various

decorating tips to create diff erent lines, piping and

textures with fl exible modeling paste mixed with

acrylic paint. Then I just toss the bag when I’m done.”

—ginny togrye

For a chance to win a month of free access to

Artists Network TV, email your favorite art hack to

[email protected] with this subject line:

“Art Hacks.” Submissions chosen for publication may be

edited for length and clarity.

CITY SCENE: ZEYU WANG/GETTY IMA

GES;

FIGURES: UNDREY/GETTY IMA

GES; MONET: NEL

SON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ART, KANSAS CITY, MO.; PURCHASE: THE KENNETH A. AND HELEN F. SPENCER FOUNDATION ACQUISITION FUND