When drawing or painting trees, here are a few tips to make them look as realistic as possible:
- Trees are not a green cloud sitting on top of a brown telephone pole.
- Use several shades of green for the leaves. No trees are the same solid green throughout.
- Use several shades of brown for the bark. Adding a darker brown to one side of a tree's trunk suggests
a shadow.
- The leaves should have some random spaces throughout , suggesting open space that allows the sun to shine through here and there.
- The thickest part of a tree is at the base of its trunk. As it goes up, it gradually gets thinner.
When drawing a face, here are a few
tips to make it as realistic as possible:
- No one's face is round (except
maybe Charlie Brown's, but he's a cartoon). The head is really oval, or
even more accurately, egg-shaped (with the smaller end of the egg at the
bottom).
- The eyes fall half way between the
top of the head and the bottom.
- The base of the nose is half way
between the eyes and the base of the chin.
- The bottom lip falls half way
between the base of the nose and the base of the chin.
Complementary colors are the
ones across from each other on a color wheel. They are ...
red and green
blue and orange
yellow and purple.
When these colors are placed next to each other in a work of art they tend to make each other look more vibrant (red next to green looks redder and the green looks greener, etc.) But when these colors are mixed together, we end up with a neutral brownish color.
Three tricks artists use to show
space and depth in their work are:
- The objects in front are usually bigger.
- The objects in front are usually lower on the page.
- The objects in front overlap the objects in back.
Abstract simply means not like reality. Wassily Kandinsky is often considered one of the first abstract painters and he influenced many painters who came after him.
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Improvisations 26 by Wassily Kandinsky
Fauvism was a trend in Art History that took place for a few years in the early 1900's where artists used color in an entirely new way. They used it unrealistically to express emotion, rather than realistically to make their work look like reality. Their work was bright and vibrant. The word "fauve" in French means "wild beast", which is just what the art critics at the time called them. The fauves were wild beasts with their use of color and they sort of freed color from having to look realistic. Some of these artists were Andre Derain and Henri Matisse.
Woman with a Hat
by Henri Matisse
(Notice the many unrealistic colors on her face.)
London Bridge
by Andre Derain
(Notice the blue buildings against the orange sky, and the green water
next to the reds in the bridge - skillful uses of complementary colors.)