The two-minute art tip segment opens with several small videos on the screen from past
shows plus the text I like shiny. The title of the segment also appears which is "Eyes are Sisters, Not Twins".
Hello and welcome to Cheap Joe's Art Stuff my name is Julie and I'm here to impart your knowledge to you today via a two-minute
art tip and today's tip is about eyeballs and how you really should think about rendering eyes like
their sisters not twins, and what I mean by that is one of the most realistic things about eyes
are the reflections and how they reflect light, well because of the angle of someone's head or
the way that they're positioned in the light you will always have a difference between one
highlight and the other. One will always be more prominent basically the one that is closest to
the light source and the other will be smaller and likely in a different place and a different
shape. One of the things that can make eyes look really dead and kind of fake is when you have
two circles that are the highlights right there in their absolutely identical. Now with a
lot of today's photography and like those you know circle ring lights and stuff like
that it does make for odd reflections but this one simple rule can make your
um portraits and any kind of work that you're doing
more believable and makes them more alive looking, and I have some really important examples that I
want to share with you from some old masters who knew this rule very well. So I want to show you a
few examples here. (on screen is a picture of Van Gogh's painting The Postman) The first one is Van Gogh of the postman and you can see that even with this
straight on where this figure is just completely facing what would be the viewer you can see that
there are differences in the way that those two eyes are rendered, the way the light falls around
the iris of the eye and the highlight in one because it's likely seated in your a window or
something like that so you can kind of tell that just from the way that the eyes are handled, and
then Sofonisba Anguissola, I got that wrong,(on screen is a picture of Sofonisba Anguissola's painting titled Self Portrait at the Easel, which features the artist working on a painting of a mother and her young child. She is looking away from the painting out toward the viewer with the left eye in shadow and highlights on the right side of her face) but it's a self-portrait this one I think is interesting
she's doing self-portrait at an easel that's what this one is called and one of the interesting
things about that is that she also appears to be working near a lit window because as you can see
the eye that's closest to you as the viewer has a much stronger reflection in it than the one
that's further away. Now you really can't make out the eyes and the treatment and the painting that
she's working on all you can really see is this weird baby like smell on her face or whatever,
but the painting itself is very well executed and makes her form very believable in that environment
because of it, and then there's Eastman Johnson. (A painting by Eastman Johnson is on screen and the painting is headshot of a man wearing a broad brim black hat. The man has a moustache and goatee. The hat creates a shadow on his eyes but there is still a reflection in the eyes) think this one's really interesting because even
with the cast shadow that is from his hat you can still see clearly that the light source is coming
from a specific direction just by the reflections in his eyes. (on screen now is a painting by Vermeer called The Girl with a Pearl Earring, which features a young lady looking over her left shoulder, wearing a blue and tan colored head dress and she is wearing a large pearl earring. Her face also has lots of light as do her eyes and causes different reflections) Very famous painting here, Girl with a
Pearl Earring, this of course is Vermeer and again you can see that there's a variation in the way
that her eyes are handled. Even though that there are very, very dark color, those reflections are
very different from one to the other based on the angle of her face, and then the last one is
The Boxer, this one's by Konstantin Somov (a picture of that painting is on screen, which features a young nude male adult sitting or leaning on something with his boxing gloves hanging on the wall behind him along with a mirror which is directly behind him. The left side of his face is in light, the right side in shadow) this one is interesting because even though
this is a full body rendering that you can very very obviously see where the light's coming from
based on his eyes. We're talking about his eyes folks, stay focused on his eyes, hello, and so this
one I think is an excellent example of even when the eyes aren't the prominent feature, that this
simple rule can make a figure much more believable in its environment and in the way it's lit so, keep
in mind whenever you're incorporating people into what you're doing, that you always treat one eye a
little differently than the other based on your light source, because they're sisters, not twins
they're not intended to be identical, so hope this is helpful and hope that you enjoy.
Cheap Joe's Art Stuff desires to provide a positive customer experience to all our customers, and we aim to promote accessibility and inclusion. Our goal is to permit our customers to successfully gather information available in our video content. Whether you are using assistive technologies like a screen reader, a magnifier, voice recognition software, or captions for videos, our goal is to make your use of this content an enjoyable experience.
If you have difficulty with videos provided through Cheap Joe's Art Stuff, please feel free to call us at 800-227-2788 or email us at info@cheapjoes.com and we will work with you to provide the information for audio descriptions in these videos.