Why Painters Squint at Their Subject

Painters squint to see the big shapes of light and dark. Half-closing your eyes hides detail and merges similar values, so what's left is the pattern a painting is built on.

What squinting does

Harold Speed, in The Practice and Science of Drawing (1913), called it "our old method of half closing the eyes" and gave two reasons it helps: it lowers the tone and widens the focus. In practice:

• Detail disappears. Through narrowed eyes, small changes in texture and color blur away, and you see masses instead of things.
• Values group. With less light coming in, the middle values in shadow sink into the darks, and the lights stand out as connected shapes. You see how many values there really are.
• Edges show. Edges that stay sharp when you squint are your hardest edges; the ones that vanish are soft and can be painted soft.
• Color matters less. Weaker light makes color harder to see, so you judge value without color getting in the way. See value and color.

How to squint

1. Narrow your eyes until the detail goes but the big shapes remain. Not so far that everything goes dark.
2. Look at the whole subject, not one part. You're comparing values across the picture.
3. Ask: which is the lightest shape, which is the darkest, and which shapes merge?
4. Squint at your painting the same way, then at the subject, and compare. If shapes merge in one but not the other, a value is off.

Squinting at a photo

A photo can be squinted at like a real scene, but there are steadier ways to get the same effect:

• Blur it. A blur does what squinting does to detail, without changing with how far you close your eyes. The Simplify slider in the notan and value study maker blurs the photo before splitting it into values.
• Make it small. A thumbnail a couple of inches across shows only the big shapes.
• Take out the color. A grayscale version shows value alone.
• Split it into a few values. A 3 to 5 value study is squinting made explicit: it tells you which shapes group together.

Sources

• Harold Speed, The Practice and Science of Drawing, 1913, chapter IX, "Mass Drawing: Practical". Project Gutenberg.