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See art in a
fresh way.
Art Tutorial:
Ellipses: Don't Start a Still-life Without 'Em.
It's rare not to have a plate,
glass, cup, bottle, or a vase in a still-life, all of which
involve drawing ellipses–the
circular shapes of the rims of plates, cups, and so forth.
It should not be surprising
that da Vinci painted/drew beautiful ellipses. This detail is a from The Last Supper–it
is the plate in front of
Christ.
The outer side, top, and
bottom edges of the ellipses are always perfectly aligned:
straight up and down and straight across on the horizontal.
Think of a "+" sign.
Below, I overlaid the plate with
a "+" in purple. This process is really pure math. Most artists make
either the right or left side unbalanced and fail to keep the
two outer edges on the same horizontal plane.
The exception to this would
be if the surface that the plate is on or the plate itself is
tilted. Then you would tilt the "+" to correspond with the tilt
of the object.
A tricky part about ellipses
is that there is a sight discrepancy in size between the back
half of the plate and the front half. Notice that the top half
of the green box is smaller than the bottom half.
In perspective, as objects are
further away from us, they shrink; and as they are closer to us,
they expand. Hence the difference between the front and back
halves of the plate.
In The Last Supper, the
edge of the table is also horizontal which might confuse us
about the ellipse's horizontal. But if the table is on a flat
surface and not tilted, the plate would always be
perfectly horizontal no matter what perspective we have of the
table.
Here, for example, I
have changed the angle of
the table. The plate would still remain horizontal.
The last very important thing about
ellipses is that the rim gets rounder, more circular, the
further they are placed either above or below our eye level.
"Eye level" is literally the
horizontal plane which is the same height as our eye, hence the
term "eye level".
In the diagram to the
right, the blue line represents our eye level. The green
ellipses get progressively rounder and open more as they get
further way from our eye level.
For example, if you were
looking across to a book shelf that had several shelves
containing plates, the closest plate to the height of our
eye level would have a very narrow rim, and a very wide rim on
the lowest shelf.
If the bookshelf were up to
the height of the ceiling and way above our eye level, the same
thing would occur-except that we wouldn't see on top of the
plate, rather we would see it from below. This means we would
only see the front half of the rim, as the orange rims suggest. This means we would only see the
front half of the rim, as the orange rims suggest.
Here is an example of ellipses
from a recent charcoal drawing of mine. The eye level is
somewhere near the top of the paper. There are three bowls and
one plate; all on different heights below eye level.
The highest bowl has a very
narrow rim and the black plate at the bottom of the paper has
the roundest rim.
I hope you enjoyed seeing,
in a fresh way, this very technical and mathematical side to the
still-life.
Newberry, Himalayan Flight, 2006, charcoal on Rives BFK,
19 x 26 inches Michael Newberry
New York, August 30th, 2006
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copyright 2012 by Michael Newberry |
