Reality is underrated, realism is overrated!

Hello guys!

This is the first of a series of little articles that I plan to publish here on Patreon every time I find specific ideas and interesting topics that don’t necessarily fit the theme of the week.

This is also a safer and more intimate space where I can tackle hot topics and be a bit more over the top without the fear of unleashing a wave of “channel killing” thumbs down (I’m still terrified by the lesson learned from Venturella and Trovarion that had to remove their videos about American vs European painters because of the backlash of the crazy, unmotivated partisan hate)!   

The idea for this article comes from a quintessential passive aggressive comment left under this picture (Patreon doesn't allow image integration in the text so *first image of the gallery, "NMM Stormcast"). You know, the ones that start like “Beautiful work, BUT…”  literally with capital letters on “but” lol!   

I wasn’t able to find the comment to quote it properly, but at the time I took a note about this guy’s problem in my notebook of ideas for future reference because it was kind of interesting and a good “bookmark” of the point of evolution of our art.
The general sense of the dispute was that he was “sick and tired” to see these crazy, unrealistic, impossible lights on miniatures.   

Ok don’t laugh! Let’s take aside the silly aspect of talking about realism around a scaled representation of an immortal demigod warrior mage travelling on lightning, because it’s an important premise to analyse the problem, and I think that if rationalised and structured a bit better it could be also a good point of discussion, but we’ll arrive to this later!   

I can safely assume that in his mind the lack of realism is in the intensity and tone of the two saturated red and blue opposing lights.
This could be the vision of a person that subdued his entire perception of what’s possible on miniatures to the flat, boring, all-purpose lights of a photographic studio that we get from the box art of every major miniature brand.
That kind of style is meant to deliver a good general view of the models that satisfies the legal requirements of clearly showing what’s in the box and establishes a vanilla rendering of the figures that have to appear to the buyer easy to copy and at the same time highly customisable, maybe also unleashing your creativity. I can’t blame the companies and I honestly think that’s the best way to sell a box of models and bring new people into the hobby but I really, really miss the time when visionary artworks and paintings were the official box art!
The lack of elasticity of the fanboy mindset turns a legal/commercial need into dogma and aesthetic religion and who deviates too much from the ‘Eavy Metal way is a heretic (also perfectly in tune with the setting)!   

Again, this is another silly premise, but I can still accept and understand the deep irrational partisan love for a specific style and artistic current that makes you blind to anything else, but I really don’t think this was the case.
Even with all the potential lost in translation I’m sure his point was his perception of an absolute lack of realism determined by his sense of reality and what’s possible not only on miniatures but in the real world!
This is a man who lost his sense of wonder for all the beautiful, crazy things you can see every single moment of every single day of your life if you truly see and absorb information… and probably never watched a movie or a tv show (*check the pictures!).  

I don’t want this to arrive as a “hippie” or cheap “life is beautiful” kind of thing, I’m waaaaay too grounded and materialistic for this lol; my point is that these “crazy, unrealistic” lights and situations are out there and they happen with such a substantial statistic frequency that stop noticing them becomes easy!
The perfect golden hour exists, the vibrant neon lights in the roads of Hong Kong exist, everything becomes green under a roof of leaves and everything becomes red next to a bonfire…
If you can imagine a light setting, it exists. Maybe in a single localised place for just a second in the whole history of the universe, but it exists, and it can be easily recreated by a good director of photography or an imaginative artist (that we can later deconstruct and copy XD!)    

I didn't manage to take a good picture, but at night I can see the bluish reflection of the moonlight bouncing on the river outside my window and coming back on the walls of my living room next to the reflections of the warm yellow lamps of the garden! Two extremely different light sources hitting the same spot at the same time, remaining separate and clearly recognizable. Difficult to imagine? Maybe! Impossible? Clearly not!   

BUT when we paint this stuff, we still have to follow the rules of physics and human perception/experience and this is where I can accept a call to realism!
If your lights are not coherent in every part of the model, with the same coherent vectors, intensity, dispersion and relative shadows, well those lights are not realistic because if you are not next to a black hole or some bizarre cosmic event likely impossible to visually conceive, light always behaves in the same coherent way!
Your eyes and brain know these rules and even if only in a subconscious level they always spot this kind of inconsistencies leaving you with the sensation of "something off" or "not working".
Our job as painters is to be actively conscious of this stuff, absorbing and internalising the information coming from our everyday reality and maybe steal shortcuts and ideas about how to synthesize and translate this stuff from better artists and other media ;)

The final note of hope is that the guy was “sick and tired” of our artistic excesses and that means that we are enough, and creative enough to make him “sick and tired” of our awesomeness ;p!