Distance from Still Life

caliban4

I know that Mark's instruction in the course is to "make sure that the front of your still life — the part of your composition closest to you — is 4.5 feet (1.4 meters) away from you as you sit at your easel."  

Just for clarification, is that measured from the chair to the front of the still life or from an outstretched hand/color checker to the front of the still life.  If the latter position is adopted, then essentially the still life will be about 7 feet away and possibly difficult to see detail.

[Deleted User]

Measure from your head position, but it's not critical that it be exact, four feet is just Mark's general recommendation. He elaborates 16-minutes 11-seconds into this video: youtu.be/0gHZuQPhyHA

marieb

@David_Quinn_Carder  I watched episode 8 again, the one whose link you posted above. Mark says he is going to produce a new Palette, a neutral one. Would that be a "Grey" colour made up of the three primaries and white as opposed to the "Dark terracotta" that he used to use ?  

[Deleted User]

@marieb More like a taupe color — in other words, not as blue as the term "grey" typically indicates, but more blue than most browns. A grayish brown or a brownish gray. Definitely less orange than Mark used to use. We actually spent a lot of time looking at it under different lights and arguing about it, and it's as neutral as we can get it. When you have a color that really is extremely neutral, it's tricky because you can always see it as being too this or too that, but then you change the light source or even just think too hard and you can see it as being too something else.

You have to ask yourself "is the color slightly blue? is it slightly green? is it slightly yellow?" etc, going through all six questions. It's neutral when it's really hard to answer all six of those questions. Your standard "grey" is easy: it's more blue than orange, so it's not as neutral as some people think. But if you look at Mark's old stain color, it's obviously more orange than blue.

We'll eventually have a canvas stain base people can purchase that matches the palettes (taking into account the effect the glass has on the perceived color), but we have a lot of other things we need to do first. You may have noticed that in recent videos we usually have the more neutral color, which is very similar to the palette color, but the cameras, YouTube, your monitor, etc, all affect how it looks, so what you're seeing might not necessarily be the same color you'd see in person.