Some poets and artists of the Romantic era were not entirely happy with Isaac Newton’s scientific analysis of the rainbow. The poets Wordsworth and Keats believed that Newton “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors." “Unweaving the rainbow,” as they put it, reduced its power and meaning. (See the
last post on the meaning of the rainbow).
But Newton also had admirers among artists, especially Turner, Overbeck, Runge, Palmer, and Constable, who did this plein air sketch in 1812 of what he called “this most beautiful phenomenon of light”
From ancient times, people speculated on how many strands of colored light went into the rainbow. Ancients argued for two, three, or four. Newton reasoned that there are three primaries, but seven hues, namely red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
The rainbow forms when rays of sunlight bounce around inside raindrops that hang suspended in the air after a storm. These raindrops reflect and refract light back toward the viewer at a 42 degree angle. As the light bounces inside the spherical water droplets, the component colors of light bend in varying amounts, and exit the droplet at slightly different angles, creating the colors of the bow.
The main rainbow forms at 42 degrees from the “antisolar point,” the point in the sky below the horizon) that is 180 degrees away from the sun. As the sun gets lower in the afternoon sky, the antisolar point raises up closer to the horizon, and more and more of the full circle of the rainbow is visible.
It doesn’t matter whether the droplets reflecting the sunlight are close to the viewer or far away. What matters is the angle, as anyone who has seen rainbows in a sprinker’s mist will know.
In this photo by Andy Goldsworthy, a man is creating a rainbow by slapping the water with a stick and sending up a stream of droplets into the air.
Next week we’ll look at the secondary rainbow and the mysterious dark region between the two bows.
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Diagram of raindrop from
Answers.comRainbows in Art,
link. Constable sketch from Victoria and Albert Museum,
link.
Wray Gunn of Stockbridge was the black boy to the left of the scene. He said that many members of his family posed for Rockwell’s other paintings during this period.
He showed me a series of prints of the photos that Rockwell worked from.
I did a quick sketch of him in the same angle as the original picture, 41 years later. The Norman Rockwell Museum has several museum docents who are former models.
But Newton also had admirers among artists, especially Turner, Overbeck, Runge, Palmer, and Constable, who did this plein air sketch in 1812 of what he called “this most beautiful phenomenon of light”
From ancient times, people speculated on how many strands of colored light went into the rainbow. Ancients argued for two, three, or four. Newton reasoned that there are three primaries, but seven hues, namely red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
The rainbow forms when rays of sunlight bounce around inside raindrops that hang suspended in the air after a storm. These raindrops reflect and refract light back toward the viewer at a 42 degree angle. As the light bounces inside the spherical water droplets, the component colors of light bend in varying amounts, and exit the droplet at slightly different angles, creating the colors of the bow.
In this photo by Andy Goldsworthy, a man is creating a rainbow by slapping the water with a stick and sending up a stream of droplets into the air.
Steve happened to be in the museum yesterday when Jeanette and I stopped by. We got to talking, and when it was time to exchange business cards, we both found we were all out of cards.
So we made custom cards, starting with a caricature of each other.
Here’s Steve’s drawing of me.
Later, while Steve was regaling some fans with some funny stories about drawing Sarah Palin, I did another sketch of him.
He took the sketchbook, turned it sideways, and created a new drawing of me, using the portrait of him as a starting point. It’s the first time I’ve “shared a nose” with a fellow artist.
If you can make it to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, don’t miss the exhibition. It contains over 100 pencil, pen, and watercolor originals, along with lots of videos of Steve drawing. His work is a rare combination of complete honesty, deep feeling, biting wit, and consummate skill. The exhibition will be on show through Oct 26.
The pencil sketches above were the first steps in developing a design for a creature that is halfway between a human and a raccoon. I surrounded myself with photos and drawings of both and experimented with different ways to draw the mask and to place the ears. Each sketch is a little different, and it takes a lot of variations until one jumps out as the winner.
The final painting was used on a paperback cover for a science fiction novel called The Architect of Sleep by Steven R. Boyett
Architects learn to prioritize certain lines and give them greater weight to help the eye sort things out. This “line weight hierarchy” follows specific rules.
Within a given form, the heaviest line should be reserved for the outer contour or silhouette (a).
If you reverse those rules and put the heaviest lines in the back of the scene or on the superficial details, you can see how confusing the drawing becomes.
Mei-Yi Chun
Patrick Waugh
Andy Wales
Christoffer Gertz Bech 
Paul Bozzo 
Madeline Carol Matz 
Michael Geissler
Kerry Lackner 
Jen Zeller
Here's a quick watercolor of the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake, a giant caldera ringed with bubbling pots of water. The pool in the foreground is about twenty feet across, with colonies of orange-colored algae fringing the edges.
