A Big Thank You To Empty Easel Blog

Empty Easel blog just reviewed my work. It is very exciting to read someone else's comments on your paintings.

The article is titled: Benoit Philippe:Impressionist Watercolor Paintings from the United Kingdom.

The first interesting point is the choice of works from my watercolour portfolio. The three selected paintings would have made my selection too. Here are few comments that I particularly liked:

"Each of Philippe’s watercolor pieces reflect his French Impressionist style—you can see it in the loosely painted foliage and the multi-colored water—and yet there’s some great detail work in many of his paintings too."

and:

"Philippe has the natural eye of an Impressionist, finding beauty in the ordinary things of life and nature, like this sunset behind a row of trees."

I am convinced that you can find "beauty in the ordinary things of life", which I consider one of the privileges of artists. I already discussed this in The Art Of Ordinary.

While you visit the Empty Easel Blog, make sure you go through their excellent articles section.

Empty Easel Inpressionist watercolour art review

Learning from the Astronauts

I listened to a BBC4 radio show called Frontiers. The journalist Andrew Luck-Baker went to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre where astronauts are preparing for the fourth servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope scheduled for August 7, 2008.

Andrew talks to two crew members, Scott Altman who commands the space shuttle and the astronaut John Grunsfeld. Andrew also talks to Jeff Hoffmann a former astronaut who is now part of the support team at the Centre.

One of the astronauts explains the training they have:

“When we train to service Hubble, we do an extensive amount of analysis and choreography to try to make sure everybody knows where the have to be at any given minute, all the way down to sometimes which arm we are going to use and which minute to pass things back and forth so that with all these tethers which are holding everything we don’t get a big snarl that will delay things by five or ten minutes.

You might ask: ‘do we execute this space walk that way?’ and usually not, because there are always surprises. But we find that if we are really prepared to execute the plan the way that we script it and practice and practice and practice and train here in the clean room at Goddard, that when these surprises do come-up, we are able to quickly overcome them
and keep moving. The really unique thing about having people in space is that we are able to adapt in real time, to get over and continue to work.”

What Astronauts can teach to artists?

• Training, Training, Training. Training is the time when you analyze, when you try new things and learn by making mistakes, correcting and adjusting your technique and your vision. If you are a painter: paint. You will learn a lot. Training also means learning from others, attending workshops, going to museums to study the masters, read art books.
  


• Think of what you do in term of choreography. Art is a physical activity as much as a mental one. When you paint, your hand, your arm and your shoulder are learning. Gestures become second nature. You want to reach a state of flow, where you are so much into what you are doing that you don’t need to think about how you should be doing it. I fully agree with Picasso when he said: “It’s the hand that does everything, often without the intervention of the mind.”



• If you rehearse, you become apt to cope with surprises when they come. You may be caught by surprise when someone asks you a question about your art or yourself. If you have rehearsed your pitch, you can come back to known territories after the surprised has passed.



• The most important lesson we can learn from astronauts is that there is no dream that can’t be fulfilled with the will to succeed, patience, passion and dedication… even going into space or landing on the moon.
  
  

Art Astronauts Hubble BBC Frontier Art training Picasso Art quote

Check your values: working with tones

Colours have 3 distinct characteristics. You need to distinguish them to be able to mix your colours and achieve a desired effect:

• Hue is the chroma. This is the generic name of the colour: blue, red, yellow, etc.

• Value: how light or dark is the colour? Value is measured by reference to the grey scale. Dark tones, mid-tones and light tones refer to the value of a colour.
  
• Intensity: this characteristic describes the brightness or strength of the colour. The two extreme on the intensity scale would be bright at one end and muted at the other end. Practically, you can mute a colour by mixing it with its complimentary colour.
  

In this article, we concentrate on values. This creative exercise will help you to become more conscious of values and teach you how to simplify your vision of tones.

Material

• Photographs cut out in newspapers or magazines (black & white photographs work best, but colour photographs work well too)

• A black marker (or any one with dark ink)
  

The Exercise

The exercise consists in blackening the shadow areas of the photograph in order to obtain, at the end, a pure black and white drawing.

You cannot use hatching for mid-tones. This is a binary representation: an area is either black or white. The rule here is that a shadow “on the dark side” becomes black.

This exercise is more difficult that it seems at first. Here are 5 tips to help you along the way:

• To make the exercise easier, select photographs with good contrast, where shadows are well defined. Avoid dull weather photographs or foggy ones.
  
• Go first over the darkest areas of the photograph, which are already black or almost black.
  
• If you see some dark lines (for instance the eye lines in a portrait), mark them with your black marker.


• For areas that gradually fade from light to shade, determine first the border (e.g. at what point the shadow goes “on the dark side”) and trace it with a line. Then blacken the shadow area.
  
• If you are in trouble and cannot decide where to draw the line between a light and a dark area, squint. This removes the mid-tones and the dark zones will appear.
  

Examples

For the first example, I used a black & white portrait of the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto that I found in a magazine.

Portraits are good candidates for this exercise as the photograph is often taken in a studio by a professional photographer and under good lighting conditions.



The result is, by definition, more contrasted than the original photograph but you can still recognise the sitter.

The second example uses a colour photograph of a statue. Although the photograph is in colour, it is almost monochrome and therefore suitable for this exercise.

Some areas proved more difficult to handle (like the shadow underneath the faces) because the shadow was fairly light and it seemed a stretch to blacken it all.


A number of details have been lost when blackening the shadow areas in the dress. This is normal: remember that one benefit of this exercise is to teach you how to simplify your vision of values and build a strong composition. This will be a great help for the block-in process when you paint with oil or acrylic.


There are other exercises you can do to work on tones (like making a linocut), that I will cover in later articles. This one has the advantage to be quick, cheap and can be done almost anywhere, provided you put your hand on a newspaper and you carry a pen or a marker.

Drawing Painting technique Creative exercise Colour value Colour tone Color value Color tone

Wrap-up Your Sale

In November, I sold a few paintings during an exhibition. There were mostly Christmas presents, so I decided to go the extra mile and wrap the works with gift wrapping for the large watercolours and gift bags for the small oil paintings.

The buyers would have said nothing if the paintings just came wrapped into some protective bubble wrap, but the paintings looked so much better with their festive wrapping…

This made me think about packaging for artworks and packaging in general.

Once in Montpellier (South of France), my wife and I went to a shop to buy a wedding present. We chose a nice set of breakfast cups and saucers arranged on a painted wooden tray. The shop owner took the time to fashion an elaborate wrapping with Cellophane wrapping, dried flower petals and coloured ribbons. The present looked so much more expensive that it was with this original presentation. It also looked unique.

Another sector that put a great deal of work into packaging is the luxury industry. How would you feel if a bottle of expensive perfume was coming in a cheap square glass bottle and a plain cardboard box? The perfume would not feel expensive. Art is a luxury for many. You don’t buy art as you would buy a dozen of eggs. As an artist, you are not only selling a work of art, you are selling an experience and your packaging is part of this experience.

You may have to adjust what you do based on the cost of the work you sell, but the cost should remain reasonable, in particular if you compare it to the advantages this extra step brings:

• It saves time for your customer. They don’t have to run around to buy the wrapping paper and take the time to wrap the painting.


• Even if the painting is for someone else, it’s like receiving a present for your customer when you deliver your painting nicely wrapped.


• For your customer, this is an unexpected extra. You just created the “free gift” effect. It makes your customer feel good and reassures her or him that spending money on your art was right.


• It gives you control over the way your work is packaged. The packaging is the first impression the recipient of the painting will get. Your packaging is a good way to develop your branding. Go beyond functionality and get creative in the way you package your work.


• Ready-to-offer artworks, all wrapped, may be one of your Unique Selling Points (USP), something that other artists don’t do in your area.
  

I would like to finish with a quote from an article on self-presentation on Behance:

"Spend some time on the packaging your product arrives in. You owe it not only to your clients, but to your work and most importantly, to yourself."

So, what your packaging is telling about you?


Related articles

• Sell your art, not your soul
  

art marketing selling Art art business USP packaging branding art artist branding

Rue de Rivoli – Oil painting

This painting completed on location shows the Rue de Rivoli that runs along the north wing of the Musée du Louvre. This street was built at the time of Napoleon 1er and is famous for its arcaded facades that extend up to the Place de la Concorde.

Rue de Rivoli – Oil on linen canvas (24 x 18 cm) by Benoit Philippe

I painted this work standing, my pochade box resting on top of the stone of the balusters that enclose the Louvre museum. Rain was clearing away and the sky still heavy with grey clouds.

The wet surface of pavement and the street was catching the reflection of the buildings, the car red lights and the tourists on the sidewalk.

oil painting plein air painting Paris Rue de Rivoli cityscape