There's a famous sequence in the movie "Modern Times" where Charlie Chaplin, working a job on an assembly line, is driven to madness by the incessant and repetitive nature of his task, which is to tighten the same two bolts on successive pieces of metal as they roll by.
I think I've found the artistic equivalent of that.
Cobblestones. Yes, cobblestones.
Who'd have thought such an innocuous, steadfast, non-descript, literal building-block of our society could cause such mental anguish? Certainly not me. I must confess, as a lover of history, to be greatly fond of cobblestones. Hell, once upon a time, I even laid a cobblestone path:
If you're a painter of vintage street scenes, an encounter with cobblestones is an inevitability. And what scene isn't automatically enhanced by their stony presence, which immediately brings forth an old-world charm to the piece?
By the Canal
The Basket Women
For my ten-painting Christmas Carol series, I didn't need to make the streets cobblestone, since all the vignettes were entirely my own creation and not from any reference. But there come those times in every artist's life where they ask "Should I really paint each brick/blade of grass/leaf on tree?" And often the answer is yes, because the viewer will ultimately be impressed enough to say "Wow, he actually really painted each brick/blade of grass/leaf on tree!"
I therefore bit the bullet and committed to having my roads be cobblestone, and to paint each stone as its own individual.
It can be a simple enough process. I usually start with a lighter gray background, and then 'dot' that with a slightly different, slightly darker gray. I mix a few different shades of the stone gray, so there's automatically some variance in the road. A good thing about it is that ancient roads are often not mapped out on a rigid grid, and even the stones themselves are different sizes. About the only thing to keep an eye on is to have them generally get smaller at an even rate as they recede into the background of the painting.
But cobblestones, like any other 3-dimensional object, are subject to the effects of lighting. So if you have a strong light source in your piece, the equation gets more complicated.
For my painting "Meet Ebenezer Scrooge", the street was lit by a variety of sources, most notably the windows of the tavern and the various street lights. It wasn't enough to simply have dark gray stones atop a light gray 'mortar'. So I broke out the 'shadow paint', as I like to call it (a translucent mix of Black and Paynes Grey), and dropped a small crescent-moon shaped shadow on the side of each stone that is away from the light. Something of a tedious process, I assure you, but once you've done one, you're pretty much committed to them all. To finish off the effect, to the stones that were close enough to the light source, I added a warm yellowy highlight to the top side of each. As I only did that for selected parts of the road, and I was able to complete that painting with my sanity relatively intact.
I hadn't quite had enough yet, so for the finale of the Series, "Scrooge Redeemed", I decided to do a full-blown daytime-on-the-street scene. Because it was a bright, sunny day depicted (pathetic fallacy 101), virtually ALL the cobblestones in this one were in strong directional light.
That required each stone having its own little crescent moon of shadow, which I placed at about the 4 o'clock position to correspond with the direction of the light. Not content with that, I also decided to add a tiny glint to each one, a reflection of the sun that would make them appear slightly damp. So each one got both the shadow and the glint. I haven't counted, but there are well over a thousand of them just looking at the rows.
After that epic exercise in tedium, I think I decided that I was through with cobblestones for good. But little did I know that though I may no longer chose them, they may well choose me.
In January of 2017 I received a commission to paint a vintage scene of Krakow Town Square for a client from my Milton gallery who has Polish roots. Krakow Town Square, back in the day, was filled with cobblestones. Plus the painting she requested was to be a big one...four feet wide by three feet high. There was simply no avoiding it. I'd be painting cobblestones again. LOTS of cobblestones.
I certainly did not help my cause with my viewpoint of choice. By looking across the square into the corner of the opposite side, I would not be able to simply go across row by row getting progressively smaller. I had to deal with two-point perspective, where the cobbles diminish in size both to the right and left of frame. And it all had to work with the view of the buildings across the way, in terms of how quickly the stones became smaller.
I drew reference lines that I thought would work and set about the task. Two of my early attempts were abject failures. The first one was too 'toppy'...looking down at the stones from a viewpoint that was too high above, based on what an eye-level view of the square would be. My second attempt was the reverse, looking too flatly across the square until the stones quickly turned to mush within a row or two. The problem with both of these failures is that you have the lay down a fair number of the stones before you begin to see that the effect isn't working. After a few expletives and a wiping out of my previous work with a fresh coat of brown, the third time was the charm. Or rather, it would be my final attempt. There would be no take four.
The tension didn't end there, because once the carpet of stones were down they became essentially the background for the figures, people, horse, wagon that stood atop. So if you screw up the proportions or limbs of one of those figures, it's no simple matter to 'patch over' the backdrop with a colour and try again. You'd have to match the underlying cobbles.
The finished 'Krakow Town Square'
I'm relatively sure I'll never paint another Krakow Town Square. When you've broken out the tiniest brushes in your kit to fill a large canvas, you know you're in trouble.
But, at the end of the day, I'm sure viewers would say "Wow, did you really paint all those cobblestones?" And my reply would be "Yes, I really painted all those cobblestones" (with my eye twitching just a bit).
Charlie Chaplin would be proud.
If you would like a print of By the Canal, The Basket Women, or Krakow Town Square, the links are here:
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