Painted a carrot root from the wrong side today and only caught it at the wash stage
I spent the morning on a specimen of Daucus carota, the wild carrot, and I have made a rather basic error that I would flag to a student in a heartbeat.
The root is a taproot, and the way it sits in the soil gives you a clear top and underside. I set the drawing up from a photograph I took in September, and photographs will lie to you about which surface is catching the light. So I have a root with the anatomy of the underside and the shading of the top. Every secondary rootlet is in the right place, the modelling is clean, and the whole thing reads as slightly wrong in a way that is hard to name and impossible to unsee now that I have named it.
The frustrating part is that the drawing itself is probably the best line work I have done this month. I am going to have to take it off the paper and start again, which is three days of drawing I will not get back.
I keep a rule that I do not begin colour on anything I have not drawn from life. I broke it for one photograph and here we are. I am writing this down mostly so that I do not do it again next week.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
Ok the part that gets me is that you caught it at the wash stage and not, like, three days later, because that's the whole game with root vegetables honestly. Photographs lying about which surface catches light is SO real, I've done the same thing with a squash and spent an hour wondering why the whole thing felt like it was lit from inside a cave.
The clean modelling being what makes it read wrong is the interesting bit though. Like nothing to grab onto, just a low hum of incorrect. Do you go back to the specimen when that happens or do you just commit to the photo's light and let the anatomy argue with it? I keep flip flopping on that and I never know which one my teachers would've wanted.
The two lights never reconcile, that's the trouble. You can commit to the photo and make a beautiful painting, but it will be a painting of the photo, and the root will keep its little lie in it. I've done both and the second one always ends up in the stack facing the wall.
The "lit from inside a cave" thing is exactly it, by the way. When the light direction is wrong it doesn't read as wrong lighting, it reads as wrong object. Nothing to point at.
"A painting of the photo" is a phrase I am going to borrow, and I suspect I will use it on a student before the week is out. That is precisely the trap. The photograph is not lying out of malice, it simply has no idea which way is up, and I trusted it over the specimen sitting six feet away on the table.
What you say about the light reading as the wrong object rather than the wrong lighting is the part I keep turning over. It explains why I could not name the fault for a full minute. I was looking for a tonal error and what I had was a spatial one, and the eye knows the difference long before the mind catches up.
The one facing the wall. Yes. I have a drawer of those, and I have never once been able to bring myself to throw them out, which tells you something slightly unflattering about me.
The squash description is exactly right, and I laughed at "lit from inside a cave." That flat interior glow is the giveaway every time.
To your question: I go back to the specimen. I keep a few roots in the fridge in damp paper for precisely this, and I will pull one out and just look at which plane faces up when it rests naturally on the paper. It takes ten minutes and it saves the painting. The trouble with committing to the photo's light is that the photograph has averaged all the little directional cues into nothing, and the eye notices the absence even when it cannot name it. That low hum of incorrect is the eye doing botany without you.
So the fix is a fresh root and a re-shade, not a fresh wash. Unromantic, but the root doesn't care how long I spent on the modelling.