“But there are things inside. I see them sometimes hiding in your eyes…”
Tracy Chevalier, Girl with the Pearl Earring
How do you bring a painting to life? How do you indicate humanity and emotion? The eyes are literally vital, be it an image of birds, animals or humans. The character of an artwork often comes down to something as small as the highlight in the eyes. Get the correct shape, size and position of the glint and the image has life. Vermeer has been called out for painting with contrived optical systems to guide his almost hyper-realistic works. That said, he still had to get the eyes right. Recently, his most famous painting has been scanned to produce a 10 billion pixel digital image. This produces incredible detail of each stroke and application of paint. As you can see the eye contains a single perfect blob of white paint as a highlight. He wasn’t all about camera obscuras. #theeyeshaveit #letsmakelemonade
Pen Paint and Scalpel 
It always amazes me when painting (or sketching) how one highlight, one stroke of a brush can literally bring the subject to life! This is the excitement of painting …… the goal!
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