Comment by woolion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woolion | Hacker News Reader

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Blocking out the values/shapes is one of the most basic techniques taught to start painting. It helps finding the right composition and making sure values are 'correct' by focusing on what's "theoretically" correct rather than what you see. This is especially important as a beginner where it is very hard to access raw visual information from your eyes without the layers of semantic interpretation your brain adds (in simple words, if you see grass your brain will tell you 'this is green' even if the actual color, with the influence of ambient light, is blue or sightly purple).

So to me this article feels a bit like if someone discovered some really basic fact of computer science, like "you can do algebra on strings. If we define + as concatenation, then we can have an abstract arithmetic that works on numbers, strings or sets...". Which would be swell, but I feel the proper response would be to say that this intuition is backed properly by type theory and point out the best textbooks that would suit the author to learn it.

It is a sad state of "art" "education" that everyone has to go through re-learning everything and there are few references with proper learning paths and a good conceptual approach. While you can learn, it is very inefficient and error-prone.

Of course there's another important thing about mindset: in my computer science example, it is hard to imagine somebody up in arms yelling "stay out of this with your technical garbage called 'type theory', it is going to spoil the author mind!". But it is equally hard to imagine this not happening in art.

I have noticed this about art education. If you go to college - you have to find a college with a rigorous program. Then, the material itself is dry and obscure, and sounds a bit like magic woo (it's not though).

One of my "someday" projects is 'translating' Arnheim's "Art and Visual Perspective" into something easier to use. My classmates were utterly confused but it is very useful.

If possible, could you provide any of those learning paths?

When learning any complex skill, the key is figuring out what the fundamentals are, and practicing those, in isolation and small combinations (along with throwing everything all together, of course).

For painting, the fundamentals are usually listed as something like values, shapes, edges, and color.

Some might make a more exhaustive list, for example breaking shapes apart into more “drawing” skills like perspective, construction, anatomy, etc. this is useful because it’s even more isolated things to practice beyond just making pleasing shapes. (I think some use just “shapes” as the fundamental because the breakdowns imply you are painting some sort of realism, which doesn’t have to be the case. Abstract art, or even non realism representational, still uses shapes)

It can be hard to tease some of these apart, but what the parent is talking about, and what TFA is doing, is practicing values and shapes (though the article also has color, this isn’t necessary). all edges are hard edges, so that is removed from the equation, and you can just practice creating something that “reads” (ie, looks like the thing you intended).

If you wanted to practice values in isolation, you could freeze the shapes, and just adjust the value of each shape to explore what effects it gives and if it still reads.

I agree that learning things, like painting, is made more complicated that it needs to be. Check out Marco Bucci on YouTube. He’s a great teacher (his free videos are fantastic, but I have all his courses as well).

If you watch an experienced artist they don’t generally take these individual steps, as experience lets them combine the fundamentals, but you better bet they put in hundreds of hours practicing them.

Well, that's the thing. In computer science I could recommend very good books for any subject. In art I've had to go through a lot of resources and piece information bits from everywhere.

Basically what dharmon said, and checking some of the most recommended books, like any Loomis, Gurney's Color and Light, ... Instead of Marco Bucci who's very popular on Youtube nowadays I got started with Feng Zhu, so definitely look out for different formats that would suit you best.

I learned from Kimon Nicolaides' _The Natural Way to Draw_ – although it's really more of a teacher's guidebook for many months' worth of regular drawing sessions, there are some "lesson plans" for classical subjects like slowly introducing colour into your practice, drapery, etc.

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