Pointillism
[In 1992, I was asked by the Winnipeg China Painters group, to conduct a seminar/workshop on the painting technique that I work in. Although my work is on paper, not china, we found that the technique adapted quite well. The members of the group asked me to write this article for their newsletter, in 1995. So here is some information about the style that I work in and suggestions for adapting it for china painting. (2011: this could really be adapted to any medium.)]
Background Information
During the middle of the nineteenth century, a group of French artists broke away from the existing realistic style and started the movement known as Impressionism. The main feature of this style is that it captures the artist's 'impression' of a scene. Impressionists wanted to portray on their canvases the most fleeting moments of reality - movements of clouds, water, gestures, and sunlight through foliage or reflected from surfaces. They worked instantaneously, without preplanning their compositions, using vivid colours, fluid shapes, and relatively informal subjects, not noble or heroic ones. Renoir, Degas, and Monet were Impressionists: Degas' works portrayed scenes of the ballet, Monet concentrated on the changing effect of light, most notably with trees, water and the Rouen Cathedral.
Some Impressionists moved from the study of light to the study of colour. From their loose, spontaneous style evolved a more complex and personally expressive one that came to be known as Post-Impressionism. The first of the Post-Impressionists to make a distinct break from Impressionism was Georges Seurat (1859-1891) who formed a group of artists called Neo-Impressionists. Neo-Impressionism is also known as 'pointillism' and Seurat is the most well-known of the artists who worked in this style. Pointillism as Seurat defined it is a very precise and demanding technique; as a result there were few artists who painted in this style (Pisarro and Signac are two others). Seurat's most well-known painting is Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte 1884-86, which hangs in the Chicago Art Museum.
(Note: Neo-Impressionism is just one of the styles in the Post-Impressionist movement.)
Pointillism takes a scientific approach to the use of colour in painting; in fact, when Seurat painted his subjects, he examined five aspects of their colours:
• actual colour of the object
• colour of the light (eg. red-orange of sunset)
• colour of the light the object reflects
• colour reflected on the object by neighbouring objects
• optical illusion colour that is created in the area where two objects of different colours meet
The purpose of all this was to recreate colours in a more precise and accurate way. Seurat and his compatriots worked in a very mathematical manner, but it can be described basically as ... not mixing the colour on the palette, but letting the viewer's eyes do the mixing (mentally). For instance, if you want to paint an orange object, you would not create the colour orange by mixing red and yellow on your palette; rather, you would place individual dots ('points') of red and of yellow on your canvas, more or less side by side, such that the area would appear to be orange when seen from a distance ... the viewer's eyes/brain would mix the two colours to get the 'impression' of orange. (back to those impressionism roots!). If you examine a colour image from a magazine with a magnifying glass, you will see a similar effect, as in this diagram below:
Background Information
During the middle of the nineteenth century, a group of French artists broke away from the existing realistic style and started the movement known as Impressionism. The main feature of this style is that it captures the artist's 'impression' of a scene. Impressionists wanted to portray on their canvases the most fleeting moments of reality - movements of clouds, water, gestures, and sunlight through foliage or reflected from surfaces. They worked instantaneously, without preplanning their compositions, using vivid colours, fluid shapes, and relatively informal subjects, not noble or heroic ones. Renoir, Degas, and Monet were Impressionists: Degas' works portrayed scenes of the ballet, Monet concentrated on the changing effect of light, most notably with trees, water and the Rouen Cathedral.
Some Impressionists moved from the study of light to the study of colour. From their loose, spontaneous style evolved a more complex and personally expressive one that came to be known as Post-Impressionism. The first of the Post-Impressionists to make a distinct break from Impressionism was Georges Seurat (1859-1891) who formed a group of artists called Neo-Impressionists. Neo-Impressionism is also known as 'pointillism' and Seurat is the most well-known of the artists who worked in this style. Pointillism as Seurat defined it is a very precise and demanding technique; as a result there were few artists who painted in this style (Pisarro and Signac are two others). Seurat's most well-known painting is Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte 1884-86, which hangs in the Chicago Art Museum.
(Note: Neo-Impressionism is just one of the styles in the Post-Impressionist movement.)
Pointillism takes a scientific approach to the use of colour in painting; in fact, when Seurat painted his subjects, he examined five aspects of their colours:
• actual colour of the object
• colour of the light (eg. red-orange of sunset)
• colour of the light the object reflects
• colour reflected on the object by neighbouring objects
• optical illusion colour that is created in the area where two objects of different colours meet
The purpose of all this was to recreate colours in a more precise and accurate way. Seurat and his compatriots worked in a very mathematical manner, but it can be described basically as ... not mixing the colour on the palette, but letting the viewer's eyes do the mixing (mentally). For instance, if you want to paint an orange object, you would not create the colour orange by mixing red and yellow on your palette; rather, you would place individual dots ('points') of red and of yellow on your canvas, more or less side by side, such that the area would appear to be orange when seen from a distance ... the viewer's eyes/brain would mix the two colours to get the 'impression' of orange. (back to those impressionism roots!). If you examine a colour image from a magazine with a magnifying glass, you will see a similar effect, as in this diagram below:
This technique allows for the creation of more subtle changes of colour, as well as clearer colours ... when paints are physically mixed together, the resultant colour may appear muddy, whereas placing dots of pure colour in varying combinations and amounts avoids this, keeping their purity while creating new colours. These dots of colour give a grainy appearance to the painting's surface, yet leave the impression of flickering light and sparkling colour. This also gives a truer representation of an object's colour: red apples (for instance) really aren't just red, rather they are also orange, yellow, violet, blue and even green.
Getting to Work
(I will describe my own methods for you, as I found that they are easily adapted to the medium of china paint.)
Tools: I use the usual drafting tools to draw my picture first. Since many of my scenes contain buildings, and since I'm a stickler for correctness in perspective, I use rulers, a right-angle triangle, and sometimes a parallel-rule to draw my buildings in correct perspective, as well as pencil and eraser, naturally. To actually 'paint' my picture, I work in liquid acrylic or coloured ink (not paint) using a straight (dip) pen to apply the colour. I have small bottles in which I keep premixed colours so that I don't have to make more every time I start a new painting. (okay, I don't follow Seurat's mathematical methods anymore!)
(For china painting, you should be able to use your finest brush, and paint which might be just a little thinner than usual. Experiment for yourself to find the best consistency: when you apply the paint it should not spread, but should stay in its dot form. You might prefer to use pen; remember, this is simply a different way to apply the paint, that's all.)
Technique: These are the steps I follow:
1. Create the image in pencil first, as an outline only, no shading. I sometimes work it out on rough paper, making all the necessary corrections, then trace it and transfer it to my good drawing paper. (This would be the same for you, but you would transfer it to the china.) When the painting is all complete, and dry, I erase these pencil guidelines.
2. This is the part that's hard to explain .... I just start to colour it in. Sometimes I outline the darkest areas first, sometimes I do the lightest, sometimes I dot the tree trunks and branches, sometimes the clumps of leaves .... this is entirely a personal method for each artist and you know best what you like to do first, [and what works in the china painting technique. Remember that my paintings don't have to be fired, so I can work in one sitting more or less, but you may prefer to do the china in several stages, firing between each, or in one. If you work in stages, I suggest that your very last stage be the darkest colours, the black accents for shadows (yes, I use that colour, but very sparingly and only where the shadows are the most intense, otherwise I create the black from a variety of other dark colours ... as Seurat did).]
3. The technique itself is fairly straightforward: instead of drawing your brush along the surface to make a solid area of colour, you dot it, lifting it up and placing it down so that tiny dots of colour are created. To try this out, get a felt pen of some type (ballpoints don't leave a very good mark), hold it in your hand as you normally would to write, rest your wrist on the table surface and lift your hand up and down using your wrist as a pivot point, creating dots on the paper beneath (I should have said to put some paper down first). Now try moving your hand from side to side to cover a larger area. That's it!
Now, consider that you want to make areas of light and dark, but still using the same felt pen, one colour only. You have probably noticed in your test that where the dots are very close, the image appears darker than where they are farther apart. This is the key .... it is exactly what you want to do, but in a more controlled way, placing more dots in the darker area, and spreading them out where it should be light. The picture of the bird on the bucket is an example of this. As you can see, the detail has been created in this way, with shadows built up by applying more dots. With practice, you can make these shadows quite natural in appearance as they gradually move from dark to light around the object. I have enlarged the area near the bucket to make the technique more obvious, and the area with the smaller bird has been enlarged even more. The original picture was done in black ink only, and appears very similar to this copy.
Working in colour is really no different. Let's say you are painting a yellow rose petal. You apply the dots for the basic yellow, close together or farther apart depending on the intensity of the area's colour. Then you would apply dots of a darker yellow, or even orange or red where the petal seems to change to this hue, placing the dots over and around the yellow dots. As this reddish area blends into the yellow on the petal, you spread your red paint dots farther apart (just as you did when you were making the dark/light areas with the felt pen). You create your colours in this way: instead of adding colour B to colour A by mixing them together on your palette, you add B to A by placing dots of B around A on your painting, until you get the colour that you want, through the visual blending of these dots. You don't need to limit yourself to just A and B, try C, D, E, F, and G, too!
I hope I've given you some idea of this technique, and that you will experiment with it. As I said earlier, you use whatever tools you are used to using, but simply change the way in which you apply the paint. Practice with pen and paper first, even using coloured pens. You may find that it just "isn't you". Personally, I love it and find it a very relaxing way to work. I must work small with the pens, though, because as soon as I try to work with a brush I have an uncontrollable urge to start to drag it across the paper, and there are no more dots! I should also explain that although I work in pen, which technically results in drawings, I call my work paintings because they rely on colour, not line, to carry their meaning. Some people would also call my technique stippling, which would apply to the pen drawings created in this way, but again, since I work in colour, creating ink paintings, then I feel the style is pointillism.
Thank you very much for reading this, and giving me the opportunity to share with you.
Take care.
I hope I've given you some idea of this technique, and that you will experiment with it. As I said earlier, you use whatever tools you are used to using, but simply change the way in which you apply the paint. Practice with pen and paper first, even using coloured pens. You may find that it just "isn't you". Personally, I love it and find it a very relaxing way to work. I must work small with the pens, though, because as soon as I try to work with a brush I have an uncontrollable urge to start to drag it across the paper, and there are no more dots! I should also explain that although I work in pen, which technically results in drawings, I call my work paintings because they rely on colour, not line, to carry their meaning. Some people would also call my technique stippling, which would apply to the pen drawings created in this way, but again, since I work in colour, creating ink paintings, then I feel the style is pointillism.
Thank you very much for reading this, and giving me the opportunity to share with you.
Take care.