Perception: April 18, 2008
Depth is not merely a part of every painting. It takes skill and specific techniques, mostly focusing on colors, to create the image of depth within a picture, and in the past, these techniques had not yet been discovered. In order to create depth, in oil paintings, there are many generally prescribed tips for successfully achieving this. The list contains things like making colors more intense in the foreground and less intense in the background, cooling colors with the color blue as the fade into the background, using thick paint in the foreground, using clear distinctions between the realms of the foreground, middle ground, and background, and making objects smaller and smaller as they fade into the distance. The list for oil painting also includes making objects in the background have edges that are much less sharp, by softening them and in a sense, blurring them. Painting that creates a sense of flatness is also a negative aspect when attempting to create depth. Two crucial aspects of creating depth in paintings involves the use of linear painting and vanishing points. Upon doing research, I also found a list of colors used to portray light with depth, rather than “lemon yellow” which is typically used as light in the foreground. These colors include gray, ultramarine blue, quinacridone red mixed with ultramarine blue, quinacridone red, grumbacher red, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow medium mixed with grumabacher red, cadmium yellow medium and cadmium yellow deep. These colors all have either a tinted blue-yellow or reddish-yellow appearance to them. During the pre-Renaissance time, people could not master the art of creating depth as they attempted to do so solely by the use of occlusion, or blocking out parts of figures by other figures to indicate the foreground versus the background. After this period is when perspective became more thought about, and linear perspective came into use, along with the use of specific colors as listed above and aspects such as vanishing points. In order to create realistic depth, they began to then use the tools of aerial and linear perspective, occlusion, different size and placements, and relative hues. More emphasis was placed on things such as making edges of objects in the background softer. Altogether, painting has come a long way, and now, when we observe a painting, through the use of these tools it is able to appear much more realistic and life-like with the successful incorporation of the factor of depth!
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