One of the instructors at the atelier I go to commented on a landscape painting in the attached gallery, she said she suspected it was done with an iPad to zoom in details so the result is that the painting is kind of done in sections instead of as a whole. She could tell, I couldn’t, but then I was only painting for a few months at the time.

Do you think the reason for this was that the level of detail (the resolution) was too consistent?

For example, if you’re working from a still life or a landscape or whatever, you’re usually doing it from one spot. The way our eyes interpret detail is influenced by our location in that things that are closer are more detailed, things that are farther are less detailed. Plus, since our vision is steroscopic, the closer something is, the more of the three-dimensionality we see. A digital photo doesn’t necessarily have this issue.

Is working from a monitor just too consistently high resolution? If so, rather than fight it, I could see it creating a type of hyper-realism that could be very fun to explore.

Alan P. in OC:

I don’t disagree that that’s a major issue. In my case, however, I’ve been doing it so long that it doesn’t really matter anymore.

Part of how I get around it is through the idea of “contextual color” rather than “objective color”… I don’t try to match the color on the screen, but rather capture the “feeling” of the color in the context of the colors around it. I ask myself “is this color warmer or cooler than the colors next to it, redder or bluer or greener, etc.

I used to try matching the color exactly but, as you said, it was an exercise in futility.

My new approach, however, seems to have remedied that… well… remedied it in a way that I’m personally happy with at any rate.

I can adlib and paint from a monitor, but if you are talking about strict copying, there are some issues, Alan is right about the light problem. Monitors also have limited ability to reproduce color. They only have red, green, and blue lights to work with and although they can do a large gamut, it is still significantly limited.

In fairness those are the only colors our eyes see as well (tone and color are separate systems)… Our eyes only have receptors for the red, blue and green parts of the light spectrum, though we do have millions of them.

This is actually the main reason we use RGB technology: it is an approximation of how our eyes actually work.

To support your underlying point, though, we have many more receptors than even the best screens do so the the number of colors a monitor can display is significantly fewer than what our eyes can perceive.

As a tangential side note: I STRONGLY reccomend the book Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing by Margaret Livingstone. It explains how the neurology of vision works in the context of art. It’s a must-read for any artist who wants to really control the message their art communicates.