Museum Observations

A. In what way does seeing objects in person differ from online? What new information is available?

The images online has inaccurate color. Because when taking a photo for a painting, there may have natural light or artificial light that can influence the accuracy of the painting’s color. Seeing objects in person can allow you to see close enough to obtain the information of artist’s method. Also you can see the objects in different angel and different distance.

B. What kind of information do we gain from thumbnailing?

From thumbnailing we can obtain the major value of the painting. We can nail down the main object and its relation between it and the environment around it.

C. What are the limitations of thumbnailing?

Because of it is thumbnail, so lacking of detail is what we can not avoid.

D. As you processed the images through drawing, what aspects of the artwork did you see accurately? What kinds of information did you misunderstand in your drawings? What does this tell you about the way you see?

So what i did was that I first look at the big picture from far behind, and figure out the big shape of positive space and negative space. I tried to block out the main shapes of the artwork. Then I drew a middle line vertically and horizontally to place the big shape properly on my sketch book. The hardest thing for me was that different colors have same tone or value, so it was hard to translate that into black and white on paper. Because I was blocking the shape and value, so my eyes were only focused on the tone of the paintings.

E. When looking at your thumbnails, do you notice any trends or patterns? For instance, did you focus on specific subjects? Do the different eras look different in your sketches?

Personally, I always find the darkest area of the artwork and then I start sketch from it. The benefit of it is that I have control of the darkest area, and then I just lightening up the rest. The downside of it is when the painting was extremely desaturated, it’s very hard to define the value change on my sketch book.

F. When you think about your own image-making process, did you encounter any devices or design strategies that you’d like to employ?

As I said, my strategy was to block out the darkest area to set a tone level for whole image.

G. As artists, you will be looking at art for the rest of your lives, and hopefully using it to inform your own practice. What other methods or tools do you think would be beneficial when you visit museums in the future?

I think bring typical drawing tools like pencil and eraser would be enough. The most important is the thinking process when we look at an art piece. We need to think carefully and observe precisely. Then we record the process through pencil in our hand, digest it and absorb it.

Below are my thumbnails i did in museum