Years ago I trained in pencil drawing and gouache painting. Now I am finally looking to pick up oil painting.

I am not an expert in oil painting, however, I am an expert in Photoshop, as I have been using it intensively for visual design over 10 years.

Last week when I was trying to scratch the surface of oil painting. I was surprised that the fundamental design mentality of Photoshop is exactly the same as that of classical oil painting.

At the core of this idea lies one mere concept:

Layers.

A retouched high end fashion photo has around 10 layers of color rendering, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has up to 30 layers, while a piece of concept art can easily surpass Leonardo in terms of the number of layers.

1.

THE MULTILAYER METHOD

Here are the procedures of the multiplayer method in oil painting, omitting the drying steps.

Minimum 9 layers are required, and as the artist pleases, he or she can stack multiple color and glazing layers and since the layers don’t overflow.

After comparing the two timelapses below, I stopped myself from buying a set of paints but purchased a pressure enabled stylus instead. There is a need to dive into oil painting to feel physicality of it, but I want to indulge myself with new tools. Using new tools to express old ideas is among the natural rules of history.

How to Paint Toothless Cuteless — How to Train Your Dragon Digital Painting Timelapse

Underpainting Technique — Copying “Two Satyrs” by P.P. Rubens. Time lapse video

I used to believe Oil painting can serve as a crown jewel in one’s visual art training since there are many prerequisites to it. Now I see it as the combination of different art modules, not as a single art form that must be painted with traditional materials.

The idea of combining different art modules is not unique to oil painting, as we do see it in opera and in video games.

Take video games as an example, there are graphical art, music, literature, sculpture (3D models are sculptures), movie, and interactions in it. To be a masterpiece video game, every one of the art mentioned above must be perfected and fused into the game play.

I highly recommend this The Witcher 3 Trailer for its graphic quality. They have to downgrade the graphics later on because the consoles can’t run it yet.

In The Witcher 3 Trailer above, you can see quality textures on the characters, and then on top of them multiple layers of rendering to present the subtle changes of light.

Now observe the Biblis by William-Adolphe Bouguer.

Byblis or Bublis was a daughter of Miletus. Her mother was either Tragasia, Cyanee, daughter of the river-god Meander, or Eidothea, daughter of King Eurytus of Caria. She fell in love with Caunus, her twin brother.

On Biblis’s body you can see a dynamic blue shade, it changes rather delicately on her muscles. A bluish skin is not appealing to the human eye, because it resembles the dead, and our brains are programmed to avoid corpses in order to avoid diseases.

However, in this painting, the sun light goes through the leaves and cases a cold light on her skin. The blue shade is done by the glazing layers above the colors.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of coloring knows it is important to make the colors, especially dark colors look transparent in a painting. Some may argue that only in this traditional way of layering an oil painting, such subtle changes in the lighting can be captured.

However, the subtle changes are captured by layers, not by oil paints.

Layering is such an important part of concept art, I believe I don’t need to explain further.

2.

TOPICS

It is very obvious that concept art and classical oil paintings usually depict the same topic.

Classical oil paintings are not only about mythological stories of gods and heroes, as they sometimes present real people. Are those real people all important? No. How about still life and landscape? As there can be no figures in them, even though some can feature artificial objects — on this though, would artificial robots count?

They had a topic, even though it seems that paintings from dead masters expanded into multiple subjects.

The common topic is a great moment (in one way or another), most of the time greater than reality itself, that worths to be put onto the canvas.

Speaking of a great moment, one may say there is multiple standards for great moments, so what should be included?

Theoretically our brains record everything we see, and never forget any moment, however, we feel that we only remember some moments because of the sorting algorithms in our brains.

More than 99% of all of our memories is noise. If you can see that the opposite of a great moment is noise, it seems to be easier to define, for everyone has a pretty good judgement of what is noise, owing to the powerful sorting algorithms in our brains.

The following are my guesses:

When sorting information in our brains, we tend to create more links between a piece of memory and something we are more familiar with, and then judge the importance of the piece of memory with the number of connections we can draw.

Suppose a piece of memory has only one link, and this memory is about an important discovery in math, say calculous. You have just installed this memory into your brain, but you are yet to repeat it in class or in real life, so there is only one link.

However, this one link of the memory is hooked to the memory on one end, and attached to the note of “important math concepts” on the other end. The note of “important math concepts” has many connections. All of these connections are now connected to your new memory of calculous.

Therefore, your brain is able to recognize calculous as important even when it is first introduced.

Let’s bounce back to our discussion of the topics of classical oil paintings and concept art. Concept art, at its early stage, as it is still at its early stage nowadays, is mostly about science fictions and fantasies. Science fiction and fantasy are traditional oil painting themes.

Fantasy is easy to understand as mythological figures are ubiquitous in oil paintings. What about science fiction?

A painting of the Santa Maria by Andries van Eertvelt about 1628

This painting of the Santa Maria boat is roughly about: we have new sailing technologies, and we are to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before…

3.

IMAGINARY-OBSERVATION

Figures are never what they are on the canvas, and they shouldn’t be, because there are designs to guide the viewer’s eye movements. This is because our eyes don’t have high resolution vision everywhere, therefore, when we are looking, we are in fact scanning and constantly Photoshopping in our brain to make up the image (on top of Photoshopping the images from the left eye and the right).

This is due to the limitation of our eyes. However, such mechanism incorporates with the memory system will, because it is an extra filter of noise.

The Art of Painting, Johannes Vermeer

Observe Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, you can see one of the vanishing points link to a mysterious point on the wall, because Vermeer has guided you to look at it. Other painters use this method to guide the audience to look at the main figure in the painting first. Vermeer, however, is rather mysterious albeit an expert in guiding vision.

Another interesting factor of this painting is that the painter is much larger than the woman in the blue dress, which is an obvious bending of reality. It is much more interesting to paint the mental picture of a scene than that of a real one.

A further question would be, is a real image easily available to us?

The photographs we take usually have lens bends while the images we see in the mirror have mirror bends and our mental Photoshop after effects… My guess is that the original image, even if it is available, would be full of noises. The conscious part of our brains may not be able to process it…