Art Theory - Tumblr Posts

Also to add to this, if you paint with RYB and only have one paint tube for each primary, ur seriously limiting yourself. If you have a cool and a warm version of each primary, u can mix pretty much any colour. This is called colour bias and it literally saved my colour mixing.

To make a long story into a short one: warm blue has more red. Warm yellow also has more red. So when you mix them you're essentially mixing all the primary colours, which creates brown (albeit a very greenish brown). To bypass this problem you can mix cool blue and cool yellow, bc cool yellow has a blue bias and vice versa. So no brown undertone.

I learnt all this after a very frustrated past me decided to google how to paint better green, and i found this article which explains colour bias in more detail:

Draw Paint Academy

How to Mix Vivid Greens and Why You Must Understand Color Bias

Learn how to mix vivid green using different blues and yellows and what color bias means.

It's a very interesting read and it's the article that made me go from hating colour theory to liking it, so i highly recommend it :)

I just had a small epiphany why you might like other people's art more than your own:

It's the lack of suspension of disbelief.

When you see something someone else has drawn or painted, you take in the content faster than you take in the technical aspects. You experience it as pseudo-real, the same way you stop perceiving animated characters as drawn or book characters as written as you get into the story.

On the other hand, when you yourself have made something, all you see is the machine behind the theater, so to speak. You're probably thinking about lines, shading, coloring in a "does this make sense? Is this the best decision I could have made?"-kind of way.

I think that's also why sometimes, pictures you haven't looked at for a long time starts looking nice to you again, à la: "Hey past-me was unto something! Why can't I replicate it nowadays?". It's probably specifically because you've forgotten the process of making it that you are now seeing it with fresh eyes.

Art is an illusion, but a magician has a hard time tricking themself. So don't be so hard on yourself: it's probably just that you can't see the magic right now, but that doesn't mean it's not there.

Aesthetic Emotions and the Catharsis of Tragedy

How I feel after watching Jimin's Production Diary - The Truth Untold.

Why do we feel so drawn to emotional outpouring of others?

Why does the suffering and pain of artists make 'meaningful' art'?

I'm going to tell you why I think Face is a Greek Tragedy and why, even though the album is a complete and perfect story, we still needed Letter.

You know how sometimes you just need a good cry? And afterwards you feel better, like a weight has lifted... that's catharsis.

Based on the philosophy of the ancient greek philosopers Aristotle and Plato, the catharsis offered by tragedy in art is good for your soul.

The tragedy I'm talking about is not like a natural disaster. Its not like an unfathomably sad real life situation such as war, or the failure of the referendum for The Voice to pass in Australia.

I'm talking about Tragedy as a literary and artistic genre.

Simply put, Tragedy as a genre is identified by pathos and passion. And the work must have a narrative structure - a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Pathos being the ability to identify with and pity a person going through hard times.

Passion referring to strong emotion (of any sort).

But how do we find the equivalent of that literary theory in work that's not a typical story? In a song, or in art?

In my opinion, we can see something similar in music if we combine literary theory and art theory. After all, what is a song but a story delivered with emotion through music, and experienced as art is?

There's a school of art theory called Aesthetic Emotionalism.

In a nutshell, this means that the VALUE of the artwork comes from the way it communicates or expresses emotion. Mood, colour, tone, language all contribute to the feelings we get when we experience that work, whether it's looking at a picture or listening to music. They help us pick up on the emotions the artist is conveying.

So what happens when you experience those emotions through art? What is catharsis?

The experience of tragic events in art, whether it's a heart-rending drama, or a beautiful sad song, or a dark and menacing painting, can give you access to emotions like fear, pity, and regret. Feeling those emotions through art lets you purge the heaviness of them from your mind and body, giving you a sense of relief. That's catharsis.

It seems counter-intuitive but ultimately the experience is uplifting. It's like having the benefits of a therapy session, but without having to face YOUR OWN demons.

Becuase of the narrative structure, and the resolution of conflict, there's always relief at the end of the story.

You feel cleansed of those strong emotions, reengergised and ready to go on. But you also feel a sense of calm understanding. The pathos part of the tragedy gives you insight into the suffering of the character in the story.

Think about the narrative structure of the album Face.

The album has a carefully planned narrative, and a sense of rising and falling energy with these songs that's strongly reminiscent of the structure of a Hero's Journey.

And think about the individual songs in terms of Aesthetic Emotionalism too ...how they convey emotions through tone, pace, language, colour etc.

I'm going to go ahead and say that the strength of the Aesthetic Emotionalism in these songs (and in BTS's music in general) is a major reason they have such impact even when you dont understand the lyrics.

Now let's combine them... look at the emotions conveyed in these songs and how the literary theory of a tragedy might apply to the album :

The first song is the slow and devastating Face Off, with its hypnotic rhythm and strange, discomforting sound effects. It reallly does transport us into a dreamlike/nightmare landscape. But the last few words of the song foreshadow that it's gonna be alright.

Then we have the surreal, melancholy Dive, drawing us further into this dystopian world. It also uses sound effects to make us feel like we are being pulled through time. Dive is reminiscent of a soundtrack from a video, but it's been separated from it's film reel, leaving the listener to guess and imagine the scenes unfolding. It feels like jimin has come untethered from his reality.

Like Crazy comes like rising action in a novel, and we get character development, a bit of plot information, and conflict. But the song itself is a viby dance track with a party atmosphere (if you don't look too closely) so we get a reprieve from the darkness of Face Off and Dive. Its hypnotic beat is enough to keep us locked in the surreal dreamlike world that's been built around us by the previous songs, and the lyrics echo that.

Alone takes us back down into the darkness of Jimin's state of mind, both lyrically and with its low tones and slow pace. We get the metronome, the marking of slow time.

Set Me Free has a totally different energy. Jimin's tone of of voice is much brighter, but hard and determined. Set Me Free isnt a request, it's a demand. The music is forceful. It's like a battle march. The story has reached its climax.

Returning to Like Crazy (English version) after Set Me Free, is like returning to a gentle refrain. Its so much softer and more plaintive than the demanding Set Me Free, echoing the earlier melody and words, but it hits sightly different in English. We are into the denouement of this story, the resolution has come.

But it's not the end.

It is not the end, because after a few minutes of silence, time to breathe, we get Letter.

Why is letter here?

Jimin could have released Letter on Weverse or Soundcloud or directly onto Spotify. But he chose to include it at the end of the album.

I feel this is so important, because the specific set of circumstances of this album means this Tragedy we've just experienced isn't entirely consistent with the literary genre.

FACE ticks all the boxes for a Tragedy in the literary sense, it has pathos and passion and narrative structure. If you were a casual listener and you got to the end of the album you would have a sense of catharsis, as intended. But there's a complication.

ARMY aren't casual listeners.

This is personal.

We know Park Jimin, the real person.

We know this isn't fiction. This shit is real. It was real for him when he wrote it and it's real for us now.

Achieving catharsis isn't that easy when it's personal. Not when the hurt is real.

That's why he gave us letter.

That's why he gave it ONLY TO US.

Letter is a soft sweet gift, a sentimental dedication full of reminiscences that only ARMY will understand. The melody is gentle, like a lullaby, and Jungkook's backup vocals are enough to make you weep, if you aren't weeping already.

(**I have a theory that jk either didn't know about letter or didn't know Jimin was going to ask him to sing. See this post for why)

Letter does exactly what it's meant to - it fills us with warmth. It makes us overflow with love. It's a soothing balm to heal our hearts.

And its everything we need in order to let go of those heavy feelings of fear and pity, of worry and sadness for Jimin that the album brought to the fore.

Jimin knew we would need more. That's why he he sent us letter, right at the very end.

"I'm sorry. Thank you," It says.

"Don't cry. It's gonna be alright."

i feel weirdly energetic for some reason, (◕‿◕) so im gonna talk about something in my mind a bit.

basically, i think that "learn the rules before you break then" and both "shape language is real, triangle can indicate danger" and "shape language isn't real, look at all these square characters, they have nothing in common" are kinda flawed and highlights what i think its a deeper problem on how we tackle art theory as a whole. Also, i think appeal is subjective and that, actually ugly or "unappealing" things have value.

skip to the star emoji if you just want to read my main point

I don't like how the drawing fundamentals are treated as a single canon, i personally don't believe in a single canon on, uh... pretty much anything, perception, even though there's quite a lot of objective ideas in it (like how lenses work, ambient occlusion, anatomy, etc.), that doesn't mean the way we make those connections and create theories based on them is objective and silver bullet proof. To make my point a bit clearer, I'm specifically talking when people refer to the "fundamentals" as the rules, to further sharpen my point of view, i rarely, if ever, believe in rules in art. To exemplify of what i mean, let's immerse a bit in the world of... uh.. renaissance era, although it would be delightful to rant about centralizing "art" as "beauty and skill" and those as whatever western society at the time thought it was good, i am not and i dont want to make a comparison of bigoted "beauty" guidelines to "uhmmm, not so objective aesthetics" guidelines, but i do want to use a specific pattern of thought in it.

Ok, so, (at least the art we known) from that era looks kinda the same right, that's because they had a somewhat set of ideas and values of what made "something pretty", and "good art", that is, realism = good. Ok, then let's say you, fellow artist, wake up in bed, and decide to read a hypothetical "art rules" book and decide to compare it to the "good art", you see how you should structure the steps of a drawing, how you should apply anatomy, how you should render shit, and so on. "golly gee, that's a bunch load of rubbish if i ever seen one" You might say, but you take another look at your 1500 deviantart gallery book, all of the popular mainstream artworks seem to have followed these steps, right? But there's something missing,

Here's a question, how do you make something new then? art right now doesnt look like reinassaince that much anymore. You might say "oh break the rules", im gonna get to that part, put that in the back of your head. Ok, so, how do you create something new? how would you create artwork? if you were trained like those famous painters, you would probably just follow their steps and mindset, and create similar artwork, but can you break the pattern while upholding restrict art guidelines? imo you can't

"bauhausdog, what does this have to do with cannons?" shhhhhh... im gonna get to that part.

So, art history taught us that, in a nutshell, people just ducked around and finded out, breaking that rigid art canon piece by piece, although it's worth noting that a lot of it was also ideological, but i want to shine a spotlight on the art part of this phenomenon, "art should have realistic colors" lol no, fauvism, "art represents reality" lol no, surrealism, "art should be realistic" lol no, modernism, "art should not be realistic" lol no, naturalism.

people broke that weird rigid old canon, and people learned that they could make new things bc of this experimentation.

Alright, let's tie evertyhing together so far, in the modern day, we have taken a lot of lessons based on these art movements, we absorved a lot of stuff, we have knowledge of almost everything, our process of drawing, our way of arting, our 'artstlye', is super varied, there is a lot of elements at our disposal, we can be as realistic as we can, as cartoonish as we can, we live in the same timeline as tawog and everything everywhere all at once, shows that mix different methodologies, philoshopies of art in one motion picture.

excuse my "middle-upper class got out of art school trust fund guy" term here, but we do live in a hypermodern reality, this is super, super cheesy, but it is everything, all at once :PPP.

Now, let's wrap the previous question, how do you create new stuff? experimenting, literally thinking outside, inside, and about the box, that box being our conception of art, also, the way we conceptualize art is super importqant, i mean, its literally the way our little heads organize what is a art and how do you art a thing.

"bauhausdog, you said something 30 minutes ago about the back of the head", ok, so, to talk abut how we conceptualize art, let's talk about, well, the thing. Until now, my thesis isn't breaking any new ground, i'm not proposing a solution, or at the very least pinpointing a problem, well, i can kill the rest of the birds with just a single stone, a quote stone.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

"learn the rules before you break them", it seems reasonable at first, let's break down the phrase, "learn the [rules](...)" what is this "rules"?, well, it's the general notion of art fundamentals, "(...) before you "break" them", what breaking means, exactly? well, if we take fauvism, fauvism was about subverting naturalistic rendering as the "correct pretty" standard, fauvism is basically messing with colors, duck around, find out. This distinction is important to make, in my interpretation, "breaking" is equal to that, experimenting outside a strict set of guidelines.

But wait, did you catch it? the weird connection with these two sentences, "learn this general set of rules, then you can experiment and get to your own conception of what art is", this sounds weirdly similar, where i've heard that before....

this is where it all comes together, follow me on this logic for a bit. Based on what I talked about the art movement argument, i said that previous experimentation (eg: modernism) lead to a better conception about art and its elements in general (eg: learning about abstraction and how to incorporate that on an artwork with modernism), the give-away here is that we build upon to a better and more comprehensive understandment. So, the contradiction to me is, if you need to learn and build upon a certain set of guidelines to then be able to do your own thing, there is something wrong with this set of rules.

To me it is just so weird that these rules just ignore that we live in a world of everything, why a "wrong" color palette is wrong? why airbrushed pillow shading is wrong?

and i'm not crucifying this one phrase, in my opinion, this is part of a wider acceptance of just this general "art guidelines" that you need to learn to improve.

What i am criticizing here is a generalized "art conceptualization canon" that fails to consider the subjectivity of aesthetics and caters to a mainstream type of art, and is tunnel visioned and doesn't teach art beyond the bite sized pieces of information.

I don't have a lot of examples to back this up, but what i do know is, there's no agreed upon, universal opinion on whats appealing or not, what works or what doesn't, what's true or what's not. The only example i will bring up is this. perfect perspective is bullshit, like, persperctive is the least broken rule here, perspective should not always be drawing straight lines converging trhough a point, honestly, freehand it, use your knowledge to distort it. "draw straight lines converging to a point" is a bit shallow

In my opinion, art should be taught in a more hollistic way even down to the little details, actually, i think it would be beneficial to teach a hollistic view in art as a whole, as in, the individual elements don't live in a vacuum. And also, there should be an emphasis on different aesthetic values (eg: naturalistic, western comic book, modernistic, eastern) and be mindful of the subjectfullness of aesthetics.

In conclusion, i think we should start refering to the general "fundamentals" as like, "post-modern western society's theory on illustration aesthetics" or in an actual serious manner something like "objective art theory". that's still a janked mess of a broken, but i would much prefer structuring things as like "perceptual color theory", "emotional color theory", "western color theory", instead of plain "color theory"

tldr: "art fundamentals" are a bit reductive, tunnel visioned and puts a single set of aesthetic values on a pedestal

also, a bit of a tangent, but i dont believe in a universal appeal at all, "dont shade with airbrush", "dont pillow shade" there's at least one human being that really, really likes the look of airbrush with a pillow shading look, just follow your art honestly, even if it is ugly, who cares, ugliness should be celebrated, not in the "not conventional" kind of way, i mean graffiti is beautiful, but i hated graffiti, acne looks pretty, but im still trying to unlearn to hate acne.

extra tangents: i think that color theory reflects certain aesthetic values and is not universal (dont have anything to prove but a suspicion), let people do random ugly shit for fun, "bad" art has value.

sorry if it doesnt sound coherent as much as i try to push my brain power my head feels foggy when i try to talk about something

I will add to this more later

Heres a google drive folder filled with art book pdfs, if anyone has some others that you'd like me to add to it thats missing, please let me know and send me the link

[ Download Link ]

As promised, it’s finally here! Thank you to all of my patrons for not only the support that made this possible, but for giving me the confidence to work on a big project like this.

Rather than providing any drawing instruction, what this writeup aims to do is help you learn to unpack the decisions being made in a given composition, and articulate what elements in a piece are responsible for its impact. Being able to isolate these qualities in your own art and art that inspires you opens up avenues for improvement regardless of medium, style, or technical skill. This is the first of hopefully many PWYW art ‘tutorials’ from me. 

I hope you all enjoy!