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step 14 Edges are probably the most important factor in realist painting. The eye will pay more attention to the edge of an object, than what lies within the edges. If you get the outline right, you can just about fill the centre with anything, and it will still fool the eye into thinking it looks pretty real. You can notice this effect in drawing. See the drawn fingers here? If they are drawn well enough, the mind can 'see' the form of the fingers already, feel the shapes, even though there is nothing actually there but an outline. Even though my work has a lot of hard edge detail at first glance, the truth is that these hard edges are rarely knife edged, and have in fact usually been painstakingly blurred, as shown here. Here, I am blurring the light side of the pole with the dark side, to create a soft edge. You can also notice a soft edge between the sky and the sign, and the sky and the blue coat sleeve. This sort of thing is very time consuming, but makes a great difference. In real life, because we have two eyes, we rarely see a hard edge at all, because both eyes see a slightly different perspective, any edge we see is always slightly blurred, depending on how far away it is. The brain compensates for this, and we rarely notice the effect consciously. So to subtly soften edges is very important in my work. |
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