Sally Fama Cochrane

Final cast drawing finished!

2012-02-11T20:16:00.000-08:00

I finished my final cast drawing at the Grand Central Academy. Now I'll be painting casts in grisaille -- a fancy word for black and white.

(For a larger, more detailed photo of my drawing please visit my flickr site).

One of the differences between the GCA method of modeling form and other methods I've been taught has to do with where visual illusions take place. Previously I've been instructed to copy values as closely as possible. The problem with this, though, is that often the values that we see are actually illusory values. Take for instance the visual illusion of Mach bands. Mach bands are strips of light (or dark) that seem to occur on the border between areas of light (or dark) value and the gradient between them.

(Notice the illusory strip of light on the left of the gradient and strip of dark on the right)

This illusion happens (mostly) in the retina, due to lateral inhibition of retinal cells. It has to do with ganglion cells being more or less stimulated when part of their receptive field lies on the edge of the value change. I won't go into detail here, but if you're curious this web page gives a good explanation.

I first encountered these as demonstrations of optical illusions in psych class, but recently I found what I think is an example in real life on my cast. See how the bottom edge of lower lip of the neck seems to be lighter than the upper edge? This may partly be due to reflected light -- you can definitely see reflected light from the floor more on the left side of the lip of the neck than the right side -- but look closely within that dark lip in shadow. The part that curves up to the upward-facing area of the chest seems get darker right before it gets light, while the lowest edge seems to have a thin light strip of light right before the dark shadow on the wall. It doesn't come out well in photographs, but I think much of that experience is probably due to something like the Mach band illusion.

So, if I were to copy values, the illusion would happen in my eye and I'd draw the illusory experience I had on my paper: I would draw the lowest edge of the cast with a thin strip of light, and a darker strip of shadow before the edge turned up into the upward-facing chest area. But I know the value on that shadow edge should be about the same (other than perhaps a bit of reflected light) -- so with the GCA method I didn't draw it, and instead drew an almost uniform dark value on that strip. However, the illusion still happens! (Or it should, if I've drawn it right). It just happens in your eye when you view my drawing, rather than in my eye before I draw it.

(The lowest edge of the cast looks brighter than the middle of that underside lip of the neck, but I swear there's as much graphite there as in the middle of that lip -- and there's no more graphite right before that lip curves up to the upward-facing chest even though it looks a little darker).

It's the difference between drawing my visual experience versus setting something up that will create a visual experience for the viewer. And something about letting the "mixing" happen in the viewer's eye -- setting the stage for an optical illusion to take place, rather than recording an optical illusion -- seems to make the drawing more realistic.

Hair

2012-01-21T10:20:00.000-08:00

I spent the last week (or more? It's all a blur) on the hair. Still not done with the drawing, but maybe the two bars of the song "Hair" that I know will now stop rattling around my head.

End of my First Semester at GCA

2011-12-23T07:29:00.001-08:00

The Grand Central Academy is on winter break right now. Here's my drawing as I left it for the holidays:

One of the most important things I've learned this semester is how closely you can compress the range of values in the light areas when modeling. Jargon translation! What that means is two different shades of graphite in a light area can be barely different, almost the same way up close, but when you step back a bit, the two shades will look different enough to show a plane break. And by "barely different" I mean "three more dots of graphite". This is useful in practice because it it allows you to anticipate that, though you need to make this next plane darker than the one before, you'll only need a few dots of graphite to accomplish this. The end result will help keep the drawing bright, looking like a white cast, even while shading to show form. I'm still not great at this, and often get critiques that my cast looks "muddy" or "gray," but hey -- I've got it in theory.

While one of my teachers was explaining this to me, I immediately thought of how this relates to Weber's studies of the just-noticeable difference (called the jnd by psychologists) in the 19th century. The just-noticeable difference is the difference in the intensity of a stimulus needed to be able to distinguish it from another stimulus. Weber studied this in terms of weights: how much heavier must something be so that you can say it's heavier than something else? The interesting point (and one that Gustav Fechner later added to in a quantitative way) is that as the objects get heavier, you need more of a difference in weights to say that one is heavier -- you can tell which of two oranges is heavier when they differ by an ounce, but not which of two bags of oranges is heavier when they differ by an ounce. So the relationship between the stimulus (the actual weights) and the perception (how heavy you feel they are) is logarithmic. This idea applies to many kinds of perception.

In vision, our perception of brightness varies logarithmically with the actual intensity of the light (the number of photons per second coming off that source toward our eyes). I'm not sure whether the application of this fact to drawing in graphite is entirely valid, but it does mean that on the object we're drawing we perceive the drop-off of light into dark (as it turns into shadow) as happening very quickly, even if the change in the number of photons emitted is linear. Therefore a linear drop-off from light into shadow (in terms of number of photons reaching the eye) will appear to be bright for longer and suddenly dark. So it's interesting to think about whether we're re-creating this psychological effect in cast drawing by making the changes in the light areas very small, keeping areas lighter for longer, and then quickly making them darker as it turns into the shadow.

Phew. Enough science for you?

Third finished cast

2011-11-09T19:38:00.000-08:00

This past week I finished my third cast drawing. This one was of a cast of a hand. I'll post a better picture when I get the chance. I took this one under incandescent light at night, which is why it looks so yellow.

As part of the first step of drawing the instructors tell us to look for "animal shapes" -- that is, to try to see the shapes not for what they are (fingers in this case) but as animals or characters. This trick allows you to get the shape much more accurate, because you'll notice if a face looks wrong much more quickly than you'll notice an abstract shape is not exactly like another abstract shape.

I decided to outline some of the animal shapes I used when doing the block-in stage of this cast drawing so you can see what I mean:

At the top we've got Tintin whistling for Milou,who's little white dog head shows up at the bottom running away from a rhinoceros. Can you see them?

Cast sculpture

2011-10-19T18:58:00.000-07:00

We work in the sculpture studio for half a day once a week. This week I finished a sculpture of a copy of a cast of the ear.

We have the option to cast our clay sculptures in plaster so we have our own set of casts, but I chose not to this time. I don't want to waste a week doing a cast; I'd rather move on to something else. So I trashed it: it only survives in photographs now. Zen.

Projects in Progress

2011-10-14T19:46:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a drawing of a cast of a hand for the past two weeks. Here's the in-progress photos, to give a sense of the working method at GCA. The line-drawing part is called the "block-in." Then we fill in the shadows in one value (called "flattening shadows"). The next step is modelling, which we do by "window-shading": that is, finishing one area at a time and then moving on to the next. I started at the top of the wrist and moved down. Most recently I worked on the two fingers, so those will probably change a bit when I next get a critique.

In the afternoons we were working on doing copies of drawings by Charles Bargue. Here are two pages (out of pages and pages more) for an example:

This week instead of doing Bargue copies in the afternoons we moved on to "tippy casts": one day block-in drawings of casts resting at an unusual angle to really stretch our skills at drawing shapes. Here are two examples I did this week. The first is of a cast of the nose on its side and the second is a cast of the lips on its side. Getting the proportions and shapes correct with foreshortening and perspective like this is really difficult.

The name "tippy casts" really annoys me though, so my quiet rebellion is to call them "tipped casts." Because that's what they are -- they're not "tippy," they haven't had a Margarita -- they're tipped in an unusual position. Maybe I'm just a crabby old lady, or maybe this is truly an annoyingly cutesy name for such a difficult exercise.

Second feature cast

2011-10-01T07:12:00.000-07:00

Last week I finished my second feature cast drawing. According to the official syllabus, we're supposed to do four feature cast drawings (ear, eye, lips, nose), a drawing of a bust cast, and a drawing of a figure cast before moving on to cast painting. However, the program is flexible depending on how well the teachers think each student is understanding the concepts. So the next cast I've started is of a hand.

Here is a photo of the notes on the side of the page which teachers over the weeks have drawn out for me while explaining concepts:

In the afternoons we've been doing copies of drawings by Charles Bargue, and once a week we've been making clay sculpture copies of the feature casts in the sculpture studio.

Color Constancy

2011-09-10T05:14:00.000-07:00

I spent two weeks at home before classes at the Grand Central Academy started for the year, and I took the opportunity of the freedom provided by mommy laundry service and housecleaning to do a creative piece. This one goes a little heavy on the nerdiness factor, but I figure I need to get it out of my system or I'll start having science Tourette's, all shouting "glutamate!" and "photoreceptor!" at people on the street of Manhattan.

Color Constancy. 18" x 20". Summer 2011.

This painting is about the psychological effect of color constancy and about the debate over what constitutes primary colors.

We see the colors of objects as relatively constant despite varying illuminations. For example, a red car will appear red at midday and at dusk, though the wavelengths of light in the two sources of illumination are very different. This effect can be experimentally demonstrated with a display called a "Mondrian" (because of its similarity to paintings by the artist Piet Mondrian). The rectangles of color in the displays appear to retain their original colors even when illuminated by such different light sources that one color under the first light is actually the same as another color under the second light. This experiment is represented here by two Mondrian paintings under areas of different lighting -- one inside and one with outdoor light from the window. Color constancy can make matching the true color of something difficult, as the figure here is trying to do, because we tend to see the colors we "know" rather than the way they actually appear under a particular illuminant. Our ability to see all the colors we do is mediated by the three cone cells of the retina, once called the red, green, and blue cones (here literally depicted) and now called the short-, medium-, and long-wavelength cones. Because of our trichromatic vision, three primary lights (red, green, and violet are often used) can mix to match any colored light -- here represented in the red, green, and violet dots on the dress. This is additive color mixing, but red, yellow, and blue are the primaries for subtractive color mixing, as is done with pigments, and here are represented in the red, yellow, and blue paint color swatches. Color constancy is fascinating to me because it is still not fully understood how our brains accomplish it. Somehow our brains are able to take the overall illumination into account and disregard it when computing the color of an object.

Classes at GCA began this week, so I should have an update soon about that... once I have anything to show for my work!

End of Draw and Sculpt a Cast summer workshop

2011-08-19T20:01:00.000-07:00

The Draw and Sculpt a Cast summer workshop at the Grand Central Academy finished up today after two weeks. I didn't finish my cast drawing, but I'm hoping I'll be able to start up where I left off with it when the full time core program starts in September. Here is the progress, as of the final day:

It's a grueling task to model form the way they teach at GCA. The differences in value used to differentiate planes are so subtle, that only a few dots of graphite can set one plane at a slightly different angle from another. Extreme control of the pencil and eraser is necessary to make one area ever so slightly darker than another. It's really difficult, and requires looking way up close at the dots of graphite, and then from a distance to gauge the effect. You can see the difference filling in dots can make in the "flat" quality of the shadow under the upper lip, where I took the time to fill in all the little dots, compared to the rougher quality in the middle of the shadow (which I haven't gotten to yet).

My sculpture of the cast of the lips is "finished" in the sense that I stopped working on it. Here is it's final form.

Just like small dots of graphite will change the feeling of surface in the drawings, the sculptures of casts can also be taken to a very high level of finish where every curve of the surface is fully rendered to describe the form. I didn't take it to this level of finish, but instead took the lips down and started another sculpture. Here is the work after three days on the new cast:

Not gorgeous, but I had a lot of fun working with the clay!

Classes start for the full time core program in September, but until then I'm going home to Chicago -- if I can ever get a flight out. My flight was cancelled due to weather today, so I paid a taxi to drive to the airport and back...bummer. But one happy taxi driver.

First week of Draw and Sculpt a Cast summer workshop

2011-08-12T17:29:00.000-07:00

We just finished the first out of two weeks of the Draw and Sculpt a Cast summer workshop at the Grand Central Academy today. Here are some photos of my cast sculpture and cast drawing at the end of week one:

We sculpt in the mornings and draw in the cast hall in the afternoons. The sculptures are done in clay, and the drawings are done in graphite.

My experience with sculpture so far is that it has been like drawing in three dimensions (as if drawing in two wasn't hard enough): the same concepts of shape and form are there, but now there's an extra variable of depth to work with. It's like when you're in Pre-Calc computing the areas of the boxes under the curve, and everything's cool, and then all of a sudden you have to take a derivative and all bets are off. Or as if you've finally figured out how to beat Dr. Robotnik in Green Hill Zone and then someone hands you a Dreamcast remote control and tells you to beat Pumpkin Hill (I still can't navigate video games that aren't side-scrollers). Or maybe it's like how the launcies feel in Ender's Game when they have to navigate null gravity for the first time (yes, I'm reading a children's book right now).

Here are two pictures of the drawing and the sculpture from after the first day of work, to show the progress of the pieces:

More to come next week!

Between summer workshops... I paint about SCIENCE!

2011-08-05T12:24:00.000-07:00

I came home to Chicago between summer workshops at the Grand Central Academy and did this painting in a week. I used my little sister as the model.

It's inspired by some research I read (I found the article through reddit late one night) that suggests that looking at light emitted from screens (and especially LED screens) slows the production of the hormone melatonin, which regulates our body-clocks and helps us fall asleep. (See the New York Times article.) Cherries naturally contain melatonin, leading some people to believe that eating them will aid them in falling asleep. I worked for two years in a biological psychology lab on campus that studied circadian rhythms (mostly in Siberian hamsters), so this research really intrigued me because it involves humans.

I posed my sister resting her head on her hand to give the feel that she's precariously balancing her melatonin levels through these two influences. The pocket-watch represents the internal body clock, while the difference between blue light (which influences melatonin production) and incandescent light is emphasized in the subtle warm-and-cool lighting differences in the room.

I signed the painting on the inside lid of the pocket watch, which reads "Melatonin S. Cochrane 2011." The pocket watch I used for the still life actually says "Don't forget 3 Oct 10." Why? Because of this, the anime that appealed instantly to my history and philosophy of science side. Full Metal Alchemist takes place in a universe in which chemistry, rather than physics, became the dominant science at the turn of the century. So cool.

First workshop at the Grand Central Academy

2011-08-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

Before I start the full-time core program at the Grand Central Academy in New York this September, I'm taking two summer workshops at the school to get a feel for how they teach. In June I took the month-long summer intensive workshop. We drew from plaster casts in the mornings and from a live model in the afternoons. These are the two drawings from the workshop.

The instruction at GCA differs considerably from what I've previously experienced in roughly two years of training at the School of Representational Art in Chicago: we draw in graphite at GCA while we drew primarily in charcoal at SORA, and we use the comparative approach at GCA while SORA focused on the sight-size method (where the drawing comes out the same size as the image of the object viewed at a certain distance).

The schools' approaches to making the drawing feel three dimensional are also very different: at SORA we tried to copy the light and dark values that we saw in nature as accurately as we could in order to reproduce the effect of light on the form. At GCA they teach the students to think about the angle of each plane of the object in relationship to the light source, and judge how dark that area should be, rather than how dark it looks -- we want to "sculpt" the object on the page, to "feel" the form turning on our drawings as the surface of the real object turns, rather than copying the optical impression of the object.

I found this new idea of how to turn form to be paradigm-shifting. When it was first explained to me, I felt the way Darwin would feel if we raised him from the dead and explained modern genetics to him. The GCA approach of modelling based on the object's angle to the light, rather than based on our optical impressions, avoids problems caused by optical illusions like simultaneous contrast. This is the effect that the perceived value (and color) of any area is affected by the surrounding areas: light areas surrounded by dark appear lighter than they actually are, and vice-versa. Finally, all those Psych classes I took were proving their merit! (Unfortunately no one was particularly interested in my explanation of how this optical illusion is created by the arrangement of our retinal nervous system into on- and off-center receptive fields of ganglion cells).

The different approach that GCA teaches makes the drawings and paintings pop off the canvas in a way that doesn't show up in the photographs (but you should still check out their student work here). Seen in real life, the drawings don't just look realistic, they look real -- like real casts and faces hanging on the walls.

I'm so excited to go back for the Draw and Sculpt a Cast workshop next week.

About This Blog

2011-08-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

I'm from Chicago and am moving to New York to attend the Grand Central Academy full-time core program in September, 2011. This blog is for all family, friends, acquaintances, and Internet stalkers who want to follow my life and work while I'm in art school and navigating New York for the first time. While I graduated from the University of Chicago with honors and can cook a three-course meal for 15 people in an hour flat, I also still can't drive, have never lived more than a block from my family, and don't know how to cash a check or fix a bike tire. Admiral Robert FitzRoy could captain the HMS Beagle when he was 23, but I'm just going to work on not getting lost on the subway.

I graduated from the University of Chicago (majoring in History and Philosophy of Science) in Spring of 2011. For one year before college and sporadically during college I attended the School of Representational Art in downtown Chicago, where I was introduced to atelier-style Academic art and developed my taste for working ungodly hours in dark rooms staring at plaster casts. While I hope to be a painter, I'm fascinated with the connections between art and science: I wrote my B.A. thesis on the development of the Munsell Color System because Albert Henry Munsell was an artist who developed a scientific color-notation system. In my opinion, psychology and vision science are as important to art as calculus is to physics.

You can view my entire portfolio of artwork (school studies and creative pieces) on my flickr page. I know you're all busy (as am I), and I'll feel just as loved if I know I'm in your Google Reader as if you call me to see how I'm doing. If you do want to contact me, though, the best way is through email.