A weird idea for a new tutorial.

I realized yesterday while working on Sacred Institution that there really is a whole other way to look at the process of image-making that I need to start exploring. The background of Sacred Institution has no contour lines and as I was working on it, they stopped being trees as well.

This might work easier if you've seen the movie The Matrix. Just as Neo must learn to pecieve the artificial world of the Matrix as nothing more than programming code that can be read and hacked, so too must an artist learn to see that our world is an array of rebounding light.

Consider this weird bit of metaphysics. You can't actually tell what an object looks like because all you can see is the glare of the light bouncing off of it. You could argue that this is just what an object "looks like", but I'd rather have you momentarily suspend the notion that you have any idea what those objects look like. Better yet, you should doubt that those objects exist at all. Turn off the lights and you can't see them.

What I want you to realize is that what you experience visually is light, not objects. Recreate the light and our minds will interpret the existance of the object. Before the Renaissance, artists painted objects; there were people and symbols that represented people, and it all looked pretty unrealistic. As the Renaissance moved on and gave us Camera Obscura, artists started seeing only light and color (for camera obscura projects the image on the canvas and the artist isn't actually looking at the objects themselves) and when they painted that light and color, their work got better. Then artists began using the chiaroscuro technique by seeing and painting value ranges more than color. Then the Impressionists started seeing the world as color and painted that. And as ill-defined as "objects" are in impressionist paintings, our minds can still interpret the patterns as objects.

And the few times I've managed to do it have resulted in good work. So I think maybe the key to improving is to recreate light instead of objects. The goal is not to draw the spoon, but to try to realize that there is no spoon.

Does any of this make sense?