Watercolor Painting Research Articles

Life on Mars?: Hélène Smith, Clairvoyance, and Occult Media

Abstract Turning away from the recent critical interest in spiritualism and its connections with the telegraph and wireless radio communications, this essay examines the mediumistic practices of Élise-Catherine Müller (or ‘Hélène Smith’) and the psychical faculty of clairvoyance. Smith’s capacity to project her mind to the shores of an alien world allows media scholars to consider the ways in which occult media afford alternative ways of imagining the relationships between self and other, actual and virtual, and presence and absence. In Smith’s accounts, detailed in transcripts of her séances produced by the noted Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy, and in a series of startling watercolour paintings produced by the medium herself, clairvoyance appears not as the uncanny other of the electric telegraph, a means of conveying coded signals from one place to another in real time, or even as a kind of psychic television, affording the viewer an opportunity to see and hear distant scenes. It models, instead, a kind of tele-presence, a mode of being in which the self and other, no less than the ‘here’ and ‘there’ of tele-communications, are shown to be deeply imbricated in one another. In the world of occult media, the essay concludes, communication is never as simple as sending and receiving – it is a problem of being.

The Anthroposophic Art Therapy Assessment Paint (AART-ASSESS-P): A peer-report instrument to assess patients’ pictorial expression during Anthroposophic Painting Therapy

ObjectiveAnthroposophic painting therapy (APT) is a specific form of art therapy that aims to activate self-healing capacities through painting aquarelles. MethodsThe Anthroposophic Art Therapy Assessment-Paint’ (AART-ASSESS-P) was developed to measure pictorial expression and validated in the framework of a comprehensive cohort design study. The validation study examined 68 breast cancer patients with fatigue. Art therapists made pre- and post-assessments of spontaneously drawn water-color paintings with a preliminary version of the AART-ASSESS-P (58 items). Inter-rater reliability (IRR) for the items was examined with Cohen's weighted Kappa (κw). Additionally, a reliability- and factor analysis (FA) were conducted. Convergence criteria were patients’ self-report measures: the Satisfaction with Painting Therapy, Inner Correspondence with Painting Therapy and the Self-Regulation Questionnaire. ResultsIRR for the items was heterogeneous (κw= 0.09-0.89, Mean κw= 0.40, SD = 0.17). Thirty-six items were excluded due to insufficient IRR and item-total correlation (κw= < 0.30, ρitem-total< 0.30). A FA with 22 items revealed 5 subscales: Shape Development (6 items), Shape Arrangement (6 items), Order and Symmetry (5 items), Color Application (3 items), and Color Quality (2 items) explaining 61% of total variance. Psychometric properties for the AART-ASSESS-P were satisfying with Cronbach's alpha coefficients (rα = 0.60-0.81) across subscales. Due to weak inter-subscale correlations (r = 0.18-0.48, p < 0.05) and the ambiguity of face validity a sum-score was not formed. Correlations between subscales and self-reports were small (all p < 0.05). ConclusionThe AART-ASSESS-P is the first reliable instrument to measure pictorial expression during APT.

RETRACTED: Teaching application of watercolor light color technique

As a branch of watercolor painting, watercolor light color has been widely used in different fields. In the field of design, designers use the convenience, quickness, transparency and brilliance of watercolor to draw a design drawing. In the field of art creation, watercolor is usually the best choice for painters to go out to sketch and create large-scale drawings. In the field of art education, watercolor tools are easy to carry, low-cost and easy to operate, which can facilitate students’ repeated practice and outside Sketching is helpful to cultivate students’ sense of color and observation ability. Therefore, as a branch of art curriculum, watercolor light color has a wide range of uses and great practicability, which is worth exploring and studying.

Integrating Art into Life in Pursuit of Occupational Balance

Dr. Sharon Gutman, PhD, OTR, FAOTA, an occupational therapy professor and artist based in New York, provided the cover art for the Summer 2020 edition of The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy (OJOT). “Goldfish” is a 10” x 13” watercolor painting. Dr. Gutman has nearly 30 years of experience in clinical practice, higher education, research, and service to the profession. Dr. Gutman pursued a career in occupational therapy because it was a field where she could use her creativity. This decision led to an extraordinary career and a life of service to others. When the demands of a busy lifestyle put Dr. Gutman’s well-being at risk, she integrated art into life in pursuit of occupational balance.

Diversity of Aesthetic Features of Contemporary Watercolor Painting Based on Big Data Analysis

Big data technology controls huge global data information. Big data can not only open up new perspectives on human aesthetics, but also easily form human cocoon rooms. The purpose of this article is to use the big data to study the diversity of the aesthetic characteristics of contemporary watercolor painting, which will help the painter to broaden his mind, continually advance his consciousness, and be full of interest and passion to invest in the creation of watercolor painting in the future, and promote the development of the contemporary watercolor diversity in China. This article takes the aesthetic environment of contemporary Chinese watercolor painting as the background and compares it with the aesthetic characteristics of Western countries. The similarities and differences between the Chinese and Western aesthetic directions are listed. 73.30% of students and teachers think that most of the watercolor paintings in the UK are landscape paintings, and they are biased towards architectural landscape painting. Focus on realism, traditional style of painting; 76.70% of students and teachers believe that the watercolor paintings in the United States are colorful and rich, with high color purity and saturation, and strong visual impact. In this way, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the development of contemporary Chinese watercolors, put forward rational suggestions for the diversified development of contemporary Chinese watercolors, and promote the diversified development of the aesthetic characteristics of contemporary Chinese watercolors.

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet, by Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: A Christian Modernist?, ed. by Jamie Callison, Paul S. Fiddes, Anna Johnson, and Erik Tonning

David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet, by Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: A Christian Modernist?, ed. by Jamie Callison, Paul S. Fiddes, Anna Johnson, and Erik Tonning

Retraction: Diversity of Aesthetic Features of Contemporary Watercolor Painting Based on Big Data Analysis (J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 1574 012099)

This article has been retracted by IOP Publishing following an allegation that raises concerns this article may have been created, manipulated, and/or sold by a commercial entity. In addition, IOP Publishing has seen no evidence that reliable peer review was conducted on this article, despite the clear standards expected of and communicated to conference organisers. The authors of the article have been given opportunity to present evidence that they were the original and genuine creators of the work, however at the time of publication of this notice, IOP Publishing has not received any response. IOP Publishing has analysed the article and agrees there are enough indicators to cause serious doubts over the legitimacy of the work and agree this article should be retracted. The authors are encouraged to contact IOP Publishing Limited if they have any comments on this retraction. Retraction published: 23 September 2022

CNN-Based Embroidery Style Rendering

Nonphotorealistic rendering (NPR) techniques are used to transform real-world images into high-quality aesthetic styles automatically. NPR mainly focuses on transfer hand-painted styles to other content images, and simulates pencil drawing, watercolor painting, sketch painting, Chinese monochromes, calligraphy and, so on. However, digital simulation of Chinese embroidery style has not attracted researcher’s much attention. This study proposes an embroidery style transfer method from a 2D image on the basis of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and evaluates the relevant rendering features. The primary novelty of the rendering technique is that the strokes and needle textures are produced by the CNN and the results can display embroidery styles. The proposed method can not only embody delicate strokes and needle textures but also realize stereoscopic effects to achieve real embroidery features. First, using conditional random fields (CRF), the algorithm segments the target content and the embroidery style images through a semantic segmentation network. Then, the binary mask image is generated to guide the embroidery style transfer for different regions. Next, CNN is used to extract the strokes and texture features from the real embroidery images, and transfer these features to the content images. Finally, the simulating image is generated to show the features of the real embroidery styles. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, the simulations are compared with real embroidery artwork and other methods. In addition, the quality evaluation method is used to evaluate the quality of the results. In all the cases, the proposed method is found to achieve needle visual quality of the embroidery styles, thereby laying a foundation for the research and preservation of embroidery works.

Interpretations of Rice Paper Watercolor Painting in Art Teaching

The ricepaperplant pith is also known as Tetrapanax papyrine, Akebia, or tall gastrodia fruit, a kind of shrub or small tree of the Araliaceous. It is native to south China and Taiwan Prov., the raw material of rice paper. Extract its central tissue from the stem to make pith slices which could be made as the watercolor painting paper. It arose in Guangzhou in the 19th century, and the themes are mainly focused on reflecting the social life scenes as well as various characters in late Qing Dynasty, such as officials, soldiers, juggling, weaving, playing instrument, etc. The works are lively, vivid, and bright in colors. As the result of using western painting principles and reflecting Chinese local customs, rice paper watercolor paintings were admired by Westerners at that time. However, as pith paper is fragile, the size of painting was usually small and difficult to conserve, there are few works handed down in China. In recent years, the rice paper watercolor painting has attracted more and more concern, which is of great significance to the study of the development of early Western paintings in China.

933. STRUMARIA ARGILLICOLA

SummaryThe new species Strumaria argillicola G.D. Duncan is described. This late‐summer‐flowering geophyte is endemic to seasonal muddy pans in the Namaqualand region of the Northern Cape, South Africa. Details of its history, taxonomy, habitat and cultivation are given, accompanied by a watercolour painting and habitat photographs.

Blood Money Currency Exchange Terminal

Blood Money Currency Exchange Terminal by artist, Ryan Presley, is an exhibition that displays Australian dollars notes appropriated and revamped to have Aboriginal warriors as the faces of currency. The large prints have taken about 2-3 months each to complete and are made with mixed classical mediums (watercolour and oil paint). This exhibition raised important queries, it raised the obvious point that why First Nations People’s heroes are not on Australian currency, instead of those colonisers. First Nations People are rarely commemorated on money. The stories of poets, land rights pioneers and freedom fighters should be textbook history but unfortunately aren’t something that we lean in our school curriculum. These pieces are important in the way that they subvert mainstream history and reach out beyond dead history to a living history.

Dinosaur art evolves with new discoveries in paleontology

Under soft museum lights, the massive skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex is easy to imagine fleshed out and alive, scimitar teeth glimmering. What did it look like in life? How did its face contort under the Montana sun some 66 million years ago? What color and texture was its body? Was it gauntly wrapped in scales, fluffy with feathers, or a mix of both? Among the earliest examples of paleoart, this 1830 watercolor painting, called Duria Antiquior or “A more ancient Dorset,” imagines England's South Coast populated by ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterosaurs. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/Sir Henry Thomas De la Beche. Increasingly, paleontologists can offer answers to these questions, thanks to evidence of dinosaur soft tissues discovered in the last 30 years. Translating those discoveries into works that satisfy the public’s imagination is the purview of paleoartists, the scientific illustrators who reconstruct prehistory in paintings, drawings, and sculptures in exhibit halls, books, magazines, and films. Those creations necessarily require some artistic license, says freelancer Gabriel Ugueto, who’s based in Miami, FL. As new discoveries offer artists a better sense of what their subjects looked like, the findings also constrain their creativity, he says, by leaving fewer details to the imagination. Even so, he and other artists welcome new discoveries, as the field strives for accuracy. The challenge now is sifting through all this new information, including characteristics that are still up for debate, such as the extent of T. rex’s feathers, to conjure new visions of the prehistoric world. Paleoartists often have a general science background or formal artistic training, although career paths vary. “There is no one way that people get into paleoart,” says Mark Witton, a paleoartist and paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, who recently wrote a paleoart handbook (1). Regardless of their …

A Multispectral Dataset of Oil and Watercolor Paints

Designers need to specify the colors for their 3D objects in form of sRGB values, but, given the limitations of the color 3D printing process, they have no idea how those colors chosen on a screen will look once printed in 3D. In addition, HP Inc. wants to showcase the color capabilities of our 3D color printing systems in an effective way. This paper describes an aesthetically pleasing tool to effectively showcase the color capabilities of our color 3D printing systems. It is also a reference color system that enables designers 1) to select colors that are achievable with our printing systems, 2) to interactively composite color palettes for their 3D design and 3) to get the desired printed color in a time and cost-efficient way that minimizes iterations. The system itself consists of a series of subobjects where each sub-object shows how a color looks like when manufactured in different surface orientations. It can be disassembled and used for compositing color palettes for 3D objects, and it is also designed to be manufactured and cleaned fully assembled, showcasing the power of 3D printing.

Visible to near-infrared multispectral images dataset for image sensors design

We publish two carefully prepared and spectrally measured datasets of paint swatches. The main advantage of these datasets is that a diverse set of paint mixtures are manually prepared the way an artist may create them. The ratio of paints in each mixture is also published. The first set has 286 swatches made from 8 tubes of Old Holland oil paints in different combinations. The second set has 397 swatches made from 9 tubes of Schmincke watercolor paints. We provide exact details about the preparation of our swatches. We analyze the colorimetric and spectral properties of the two datasets in order to show the spread of the colorimetric gamut and the intrinsic, spectral dimensionality of the datasets. The dataset will be available on http://cam.mpi-inf.mpg.de/ and http://www.azadehasadi.com/.

Apie oberbombardyro Vaitiekaus Ivaškevičiaus 1791 m. Vilniaus piešinį

ABOUT THE 1791 PICTURE OF VILNIUS BY OBERBOMBARDIER WOJCIECH IWASZKIEWICZ The article discusses a watercolour painting from a private collection authored by Wojciech Iwaszkiewicz, artillery ober-bombardier of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In the background of the urban landscape are objects that allow easy identification of the capital of Lithuania: partly ruined Upper Castle and the Bekesh Hill. Other objects and figures are identifiable by the inscriptions on the other side of the painting. Particularly interesting is the first plan of the drawing, which depicts the Tatar Gates and a few wooden houses standing near them. This is the only known view of the Tatar Gates of the Vilnius defensive wall. The buildings also depict a number of city dwellers, most of them being military personnel of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (artillery officer, cannoneer, ober-feurwerker, etc., as well as the author of the painting himself ), thus the picture is also interesting as a source of research into different military uniforms. Inscriptions by the Upper Castle and Bekesh Hill reflect legends and stories, popular among Vilnians at the end of the eighteenth century. In the former case, one tower of the castle is named as the temple of the pagan god Lelum Polelum Swistum po Swistum. Yet above the Bekesh Hill is written a legend about the reckless death of this cadet on the way down while riding a horse. Through historical sources we were able to determine that W. Iwaszkiewicz enlisted into the army of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a cannoneer in the spring of 1790, soon was raised to the rank of the bombardier and in the spring of 1791 to the ober-bombardier, yet in the summer of 1793 he was raised to the rank of stykjunker. The painting in analysis is related to a particular event: attempts to reform and strengthen the Lithuanian artillery at the end of the eighteenth century and the amassing of the military in Vilnius. In spite of somewhat primitive style of the painting, it’s a very interesting and valuable document of urban iconography. Keywords: Vilnius, Wojciech Iwaszkiewicz, Bekesh Hill, Upper Castle, Tatar Gates, artillery.

Application of nanopigment watercolour fine art in painting

With the development of science and technology and the development of watercolour paints, tools and techniques, watercolour as an independent painting has gradually exerted its value in contemporary society. Aiming at the problems of small particle size, large specific surface area and large surface free energy of the nanopigment, and the possibility of agglomeration due to adsorption, the nanopigment was modified to make it exhibit its special properties. Experiments show that the larger the average particle size of the pigment, the larger the amount of water precipitation, and the worse the stability performance. As the viscosity of the pigment increases, the stability gradually increases, and then continues to decrease. Nano-Al2O3 shows negative charge and can be well mixed with nano-SiO2 dispersion. The mixing process can be regarded as a process of mutual modification, and nanopigments with uniform dispersion, good stability and good compatibility can be obtained. Utilising the uncertainty and inclusiveness of the watercolour medium itself, and from the simple watercolour painting of painting techniques to the use of comprehensive materials to enrich the picture, the ideological pursuit is finally achieved. In the creation, the artist needs to make the most of the characteristics of the material, combined with personal consciousness, to show his creative ideas as much as possible, so that the work is creative and expressive. With regard to how to use expanded materials and screen composition to achieve and enrich the expressiveness of artistic works, this paper starts from the theoretical basis of 'expression', demonstrates the course of expression, and advances the theory of expressiveness continuously. The abstract things are summarised into picture symbols, and the shape, colour, and picture composition of the picture, so as to enhance the expressiveness of the work, to achieve art itself is the product of the artist's concept, and to make the artistic work more expressive.

Creation of Watercolor Painting within the Differences between Eastern and Western Aesthetics

Creation of Watercolor Painting within the Differences between Eastern and Western Aesthetics

Similarity and Difference Analysis of National Styles in Russian and Chinese Watercolor Painting

Similarity and Difference Analysis of National Styles in Russian and Chinese Watercolor Painting

Visual form beyond traditional media——On the expression and construction of watercolor art in digital painting

In the context of the development of digital image era and digital media art, watercolor art, as a traditional form of painting, will inevitably experience a subversive change and transformation of painting methods and ideas. By analyzing the artistic expression and construction process of watercolor art in digital painting, this paper finds out the aesthetic value and significance of watercolor art in digital painting, discusses the relationship between traditional watercolor painting and digital painting and the new space of watercolor development in the future.

Luc-François Granier's Dreams of Moby-Dick

Luc-François Granier's Dreams of Moby-Dick Gordon M. Poole The presentation of Luc-François Granier's book of paintings inspired by Moby-Dick, held in Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, Venice, in January 2019, included the exhibition of the original 72 pen-sketch cum watercolor paintings (Luc-François Granier, Moby Dick, ed. Giovanni Andrea Semerano. Rome: La Camera Verde, 2019; the book holds only the illustrations, not the text of Moby-Dick). Granier is a French painter as well as a creator of installations, videos, carvings in polystyrene and various other materials, novelist, illustrator of books for children and adults, playwright, and translator from Italian, German, and Spanish into French. He has lived and worked off and on for some years in Venice, becoming well-known in intellectual and pictorial circles; he is also a companionable presence in his favorite restaurants and coffee-bars. And he is hooked on Moby-Dick. Before ever having visited Venice, in an unedited sketch from which we shall be quoting titled "365 Rêves de Moby Dick," he tells of a reproduction in the house of his "philosopher grandmother" depicting none other than the very Palazzo Contarini-Polignac where the exhibition of his work was held. We'll come back to the "philosopher grandmother" in a bit. He recalls that it must have been 1983, in mid-winter, when he chanced upon the same reproduction hanging in the hall of another building, on the Atlantic coast of France where he was touring, and it was this coincidence that moved him to lodge there. It so happened that Moby-Dick was his sole companion in his lodgings, while the shutters were suggestively buffeted by boreal storms and icy spray. While he read in the least cold room, all bundled up, he whittled and molded some of the main characters of Melville's romance into figurines. In his words (I translate from the French), "On the mantelpiece sat a piece of jetsam, called Queequeg, pocked with holes; another one shaped like a fish was Moby, while Captain Ahab lived in a sprig of heather I had scraped clean with my fingernails and capped with a plastic bellflower" ("365 Rêves"). It is clear that Granier reacted to Melville's novel from the start in his own peculiar way, turning some of its protagonists into symbols, or perhaps totems or idols. So when he came to Rome in 2015, he was already primed for Melville, and it was there that his readings as a young man bore fruit. He had come on a visit to Giovanni Andrea Semerano, a publisher of elegant books and [End Page 123] organizer of excellent cultural events, who was bringing out Granier's novel La Pierre (The Stone). To while away the time during a lengthy publishing process, Granier took up Moby-Dick again, making illustrative paintings whenever he felt the urge. By February 2017 he had amassed 72 illustrations. In "365 Rêves" he itemizes the results: The last three days, with the final hunt, took up a full twelve drawings. The last water color shows the narrator grasping the coffin lifesaver that had been his friend's. Ishmael and the remembrance of Queequeg. The remaining 59 include two introductory ones, the first representing my recollections of Atlantic readings, the second representing Moby Dick smashing the colosseum to pieces; and they sweep me into his wake to pursue my dreamlike meanderings through the pages of the romance ("365 Rêves"). Why would Moby Dick destroy the colosseum? Perhaps the whale saw the colosseum, in Granier's mind, as representative of an imperial Roman ship of state, with the slaughter of wild animals and the combat between gladiators, sometimes to the death. Or, perhaps he saw it as an image of the United States, warring against the environment and now mired in its global power projection, symbolized in the Pequod, a worldwide war against whatever the white whale might be taken to symbolize. In a countryside estate in the town of Tuscania (in the Italian Lazio regione) in the summer before the 2019 Venice exhibition, the present writer had already seen Granier's 72 paintings when they were exhibited...