Dang girl. You are learning a lot of new tricks. Keep it up.

And thanks for passing it on.

Yes, bringing life into a painting really changes things. If you want to take it to the next level, try telling a story!

I love looking at architectural renderings done in real watercolor for ideas about figures. This is an excellent site:

https://www.genesisstudios.com/digital-watercolor-renderings/

Jan

Gurney’s right, we do tend to look at a human figure even if it’s not prominent. And if there’s a hidden human looking at you, you will probably notice its face, especially making eye-contact, even if it’s highly camouflaged and even if you’re not actively seeking to find it.

The academic schools of Europe from the mid-Eighteenth Century onward recommended certain levels and amounts of people, livestock, and buildings, for enhancing certain types of landscapes. It was all very coordinated, like, don’t even depict a gate for human passage through a fence as in its open state, unless you want to either point out that nobody’s going through it (the whole “lonely wilderness” or “abandoned ruin” effect), or, conversely, want to paint the people who are actively going through it. Otherwise paint it as closed. Rules like that. The overall use of people and livestock (and other things that can be added to or removed from your scene with relative impunity) was in these academic training circles called “staffage”, which literally is French for “personnel.” I think if you realize just how the landscapes were thought of (right or wrong, it’s how they taught it at the time) in that manner, as though you had to populate them artificially in exactly the right way and your people were essentially placed wherever you as the painter NEEDED them, for the benefit of the composition, you get a really different view of how things work.

Subsequently, in the 1950s in the USA, a similar set of theories arose, to the point that there was generally an expectation of having one off-center human as a focal point, thereby giving perspective, scale, and interest. Whenever I see some of the more traditional (and sentimental) of the early California School watercolors, I tend to wonder, “hmm, wouldn’t it look a lot better if you just nixed that ONE GUY walking his dog right there in the middle of the street?” The good painters in the school don’t commit the mistake of assuming that a counter-contextual human makes the whole painting worthwhile, of course, so it’s hard to find examples, but here’s something that demonstrates that “1950s compositional requirement” element:

http://www.calart.com/Photo.asp?src=CaWatercolorsGraphics/1postrincon.jpg

Those two swooshes that represent PEOPLE … to me, they’re SUCH an afterthought to the composition. I have no complaints about the work over all, I think it’s a good painting otherwise, but what happened there with the people? The rules said they should be there. Having a bigger and a littler one, going up the length of the hill, supposedly helps us see that the road along the hill recedes into the distance, that’s the rule. I don’t dislike the people that much, until I notice them, and then I notice myself noticing them, at which point I wonder what they’re doing there, and then I can’t un-notice them. So to speak.

Then my mind goes haywire: Why’s the dude who is all in black and halfway down the hill walking in the middle of the street? Why’s the guy (woman?) up here on the top of the hill wearing a billowy blue smock? Is that a hat above the blue smock, or a hair-do? Are they playing catch? Maybe the guy down the hill is running to try to get the ball before it rolls away into the bay. Do they live there? Is there another person up in one of the gantries or is that just a split in the curtains? Why aren’t there other people farther down the sidewalk? Maybe there’s a plague, maybe they all died of bubonic plague … and that fellow in the blue is the plague doctor with his big hooked-beak nose-gay mask but I can’t see the hook in the beak so maybe he’s LOOKING RIGHT AT US AND WE’RE GOING TO DIE OF THE PLAGUE … etc.. Probably not what the painter intended. Probably would have been a better response if I hadn’t gotten so paranoid. But the people, they’re just so, you know, THERE, they’re so THERE there, for no other reason except for the purpose of being there, so say the rules. There they are, such that I can’t help but start speculating on why they’re there.

I don’t feel half so interrogatory about other stuff. I don’t inherently demand to know the raison d’être of the water-towers in the distant skyline, or of the short palmetto type plant obscuring one house front, or of the telephone poles. I naturally just figure, “Well, that’s what’s on the street, so when you paint the view of the street, that’s all going to be an essential part of the view.” But then the people get me going differently. They aren’t just telephone poles or palmettos, they have HISTORY and CHARACTERS and so I just start objecting to them being used as mere staffage.

I agree that adding figures adds life to many paintings, but as a viewer unless its a portrait I generally dont like specific people,,, I like silhouettes or figures that can not be personally identified,

I prefer no people in my paintings. I read a interesting book recently about landscape painting that argued, and I think correctly, that people like landscape paintings as a place to escape to from other people and even from civilization as a whole. Certainly why *I* like them.

Re the Cal watercolor painting, it’s clear that the guy in black is holding a knife and is going to mug the lady in the blue poncho. But what does she have beneath that poncho? Whatever it is, it’s clearly more than a match for the guy’s knife.

Hint, people are easier if they are facing away from the viewer

I’m guilty of doing that. I may have to take your class so that I can turn them around.