Thursday, October 15, 2015

Photorealistic Painting Techniques

Cameras and photographs if the inspiration for photorealist paintings.


Photorealism or "superrealism" was an American Craft movement that began in the 1960s and peaked in the 1970s. The highly illusionistic type attempted to reproduce the verisimilitude of photographs. Photorealism arose from the pop Craft movement and was a reaction to the achievements of minimalism, conceptual Craft and summary expressionism, all of which veered outside from realism and illusionistic techniques. Cognate the pop artists, photorealists Frequently used commercial and advertising imagery as their passage complication, also as scenes from Day-to-day dash.


Photorealistic Painting


Photorealistic painters retain many traditional techniques to accomplish a meaning of photographic hyper-realism in their works of Craft. They applicability cameras to practise reference images for their paintings. They then appropriateness mechanical or semi-mechanical methods to transfer the facsimile onto a canvas. These techniques accommodate the benefit of a projector, grid or transfer paper. The artists carefully inspect the details of their images to dream up highly finished paintings with no visible brushstrokes or signs of the portrayal means.


General Techniques


He drew the images directly onto the canvas, then carefully recorded the reflections in oil paint.

Chuck Close

Chuck Close based his mural-sized paintings on photographs of himself or his friends. He enlarged two of the photographs to an 11-inch by 14-inch size. Every circumstance is meticulously painted with cramped pointed-tip round brushes. Everyone shadow and accented spotlight is faithfully reproduced from the reference photograph.


Richard Estes


Richard Estes, along with Chuck Close, was one of the founders of the photorealism movement. He painted in a trompe l'oeil style reminiscent of 15th-century Italian Renaissance perspective painting. He employed the exacting techniques of the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age painters. Estes took color photographs, focusing on the effects of light reflected off glass storefronts and the windows of buildings.Photorealist paintings are executed in steps, by an additive development of laying down layers of gloss, one atop another. The picture begins with a highly detailed under-painting that establishes the amount constitution of the picture. Glazes of thinned obvious tint are smoothly brushed on, building up the colours and defining the three-dimensional forms with a mechanical precision.



He used a grid technique to further enlarge the scale of the image and transfer it onto his canvas. On one of the photos he drew a grid, numbering and lettering each square. He then painted each small square of the canvas, using the formal elements of design and color. Using both photographs as references, the artist completed the details of each square with acrylic paint and airbrush.