All opinions are mine and reflect my own experiences.
DRAWING WITH ACRYLICS
Painting is for thinkers and painting with acrylics is like working at McDonalds, with better results though. You have to be quick and make many decisions very quickly. It is good training for other kinds of painting. After mastering some acrylic techniques, you’ll feel more confident dealing with other mediums. I believe that even pastel people can benefit from doing acrylic work.
An advantage to working with acrylics is also its disadvantage. The paints dries very quickly. The advantage to this is that you can paint over something when you don’t like the way it is going. The disadvantage, of course, is that you cannot dilly dally as you can with oils. You will want to decide just how much of the painting you will be working on for certain amount of time, in order to not waste paint. Then you will put small amounts of paint onto your palette.
Using small amounts creates one problem that you need to think about. If you use a limited palette, it is easier to sort out, but if your palette becomes wide, you will forget what colors you used to create the colors you’re working with. I try to handle this by working with certain groups of colors at a time and keeping the containers out to remind me what I used. This is especially true if you buy craft paint that is mixed in a wide range of colors. If you’re a purist and want to only use conventional colors that correspond to oil colors, you’ll still want to keep your palette simple. There is, as many of you know, a good chance that you might muddy your colors by having too many complimentary colors on your palette at once. If you do end up your painting session with too much paint on your palette, my solution is to grab another canvas and use up that paint by quickly creating a background for your next painting. That way you don’t have a white canvas staring at you later on.
I will assume that most of you have learned the color wheel (or wheels) and have some experience at mixing paints. Mixing paints can be just as simple or complex as you wish to make it. You can spend your life working out paint mixing techniques or you can go with what other artists have established as the convention. There are some who like to make their own paints. I am not going to go into that area.
Drawing with your acrylics offers you several advantages over using pencils as your base. Using your paintbrush to draw with will cause you to develop shapes with little effort. You can quickly outline objects and sort out your composition this way. You can test out different brushes and try out different shapes by drawing with paint. It gets you right into your painting. When you draw out a composition, you may tend to overwork the details with a pencil but not with a paintbrush. You can also work out the tonalities of the painting, if you plan to have a tonal painting. This means getting the lights and darks worked out ahead of time, giving you a game plan to work with. This is especially helpful when you’re working plein air paintings because the light can change so quickly. Establishing the light source and how it hits various objects right away is very helpful after you take the work back to your studio. Also establishing the direction and tone of shadows is helpful because this will change as the time goes by. Even working in a studio, the light will change throughout the day. Many famous artists were known to only work for an hour or less in certain lights. I don’t recommend this unless you really have nothing better to do or you’re working on more than one thing at a time.
SURFACES, COMPOSITION, TOOLS
Exploring different surfaces/ purposes for painting
Not all paintings are meant to be framed. Acrylic painting lends itself to a myriad of surfaces, from flat canvases to illustration board, from fabrics to wooden items, from walls to floors. Pillows can be painted on with acrylic paint and washed in a washer for years.
Canvases can be made from any kind of fabric as long as the fabric accepts the paint. Silks, cottons, linens, upholstery cottons, cotton blends, and t-shirt material are all examples of textile surfaces that are appropriate for acrylics. Shelf mushrooms can be painted on as well as wood and even stones, provided there is a protective coat applied afterward. Furniture painting with acrylics is a favorite avocation of mine. Walls provide excellent backgrounds for mural work and even floors can be painted on with acrylics. Once the paint has dried, it has very high durability.
Using unfinished fabrics as canvases gives an artist choices they don’t have with gessoed canvases. Many techniques are possible, such as watercolor effects or batik effects. Sometimes using the color of the fabric can add to the painting. The fabric needs to be stapled to stretcher bars, the same as gessoed canvas, but during the painting process may stretch a bit and need to be restretched for framing. Professional stretching should be considered when you’re doing an important piece.
Other surfaces you can paint on with acrylics are illustration board and watercolor papers. You will find, when you experiment a little, that you can paint on almost anything with acrylics depending on your technique. It is not recommended that you paint on drawing paper, for instance, with acrylics, but using a dry brush technique would allow this. This comes in handy for ‘sketching’ out ideas quickly.
The tools
Standard brushes will allow for many effects and you’ll want to keep any old ones for smudging or stippling effects, as well as some sharp edged brushes for finer work. But there are a lot of other tools you can buy or create that will give you an array of great effects. The sponge, whether natural or synthetic, is good for background effects and layering with quick and surprising results. Even using your rags or your fingers will give you some special effects. Don’t forget that your fingers can be your most reliable and versatile tools. Acrylic paints wash off easily and have no toxicity. You can use knives in some applications for thicker textures. However, only the more professional acrylics will have enough thickness to build up much texture. Craft acrylics and Liquitex acrylics, for example, are too thin for this effect.
Masking fluids can be used for blocking areas that you don’t want to have painted when you’re doing an all over color or effect, such as stippling. They can also be used for random areas that you want to highlight. As in watercolors, they can keep white areas white while you work on other areas.
There are many mediums to aid in the flow or drying time of acrylic paints, including plain water. Experimentation with these mediums helps you know how they will act when you need them.
Oil and water don’t mix. This is good! A special effect can be achieved by using alkyd paints in some areas and the acrylics in others. Spray paints are also fun to play with in this way. Oil paint does go over acrylics very well as long as the acrylics are thinly applied.
The palette is an essential item, particularly for acrylics, because of how quickly acrylics dry. You don’t want to have a palette, generally, without edges or the paint will run and drip when you thin it. If you work, as I do, by moving around a lot or by keeping your painting area in a high traffic area (pets, kids, etc) you’ll want a container that has a lid as your palette. You’ll also appreciate having one that is light and easy to carry around with you. I collect old microwave containers for my palettes because they are easy to carry and clean out. In addition to these portable palettes, you’ll want one that sits on your table and may have a sponge in its base to keep the paint moist. These can be found at most art stores. I rarely work this way. If you use small trays, as I do, just make sure you keep a small number of colors in them at any time so you don’t muddy your paints.
As in oil painting, having a long stick for stabilizing your arm when you’re doing fine work is a good idea.
And keeping old cups or bowls for holding water is essential. You need to put your brush into water as soon as you are not working with it, or if you get interrupted. Once acrylic has dried on a brush, you cannot easily remove it. I am a bad sinner when it comes to cleaning out my brushes, but I always toss them into water when they’re not in use. Of course the larger brushes will take longer to dry out when you want to use them again.
Rags are also essential, particularly if you’re as messy as I am with paint. I usually keep one by my side and one on my lap. The one in my lap serves to wipe the brush with while the other one is more for grabbing up quickly and using on the canvas in case I’ve painted something and I need to remove it. You can see that my clothes are also considered part of the painting process. For those of you who are much tidier than I am, you will still want to keep a couple rags close by.
There are times when you may need to quickly sketch something while you’re painting or you’ll need to make a mark. Keep a regular graphite pencil around, as well as a white drawing pencil for darker areas. I also keep things like wooden skewers or toothpicks around for etching or trying out some effect.
One very important tool I keep handy is a small pair of plyers. When a tube of paint has been around awhile, the lid often becomes one with the tube. Trying to open a tube with your hands sometimes leads to a very twisted tube and no paint. The leverage a pair of pliers has is enough to open the most tenacious tube of paint.
The paints themselves are your decision. With acrylics, there are hundreds of choices to make, and they are all very subjective. It depends on what the project is, what your taste in colors are and what the subject matter demands. For this class, you should have 4 colors, such as red, yellow, blue, and green. But if you only want to work in blues, that’s fine. The color white is important. Titanium is considered the best white but zinc is good, too. Zinc tends to be cooler or flatter. In craft paints there are as many whites as there are reds. We will only use white for highlighting here. To mix a color with white tends to diminish the intensity of the color. It is often preferable to just add water to the paint if you want a thinner shade of color, or if you’re painting in layers. Working with white is not something I want to focus on right now. However, using white with color for your underpainting will make the underpainting lighter than the finished work, and it will also provide a lightening effect overall.
DRAWING WITH PAINT
Tonalities & a simple palette & the color blue
Acrylics can be great for underpaintings when oil paints are going to be used. I like to use a cool blue paint for drawing out the design. You can use blue for determining your tonalities but a brown or sepia color is generally considered best for blocks of color. For the finished painting, a simple palette can be very effective, and a lot easier to handle. Because acrylics dry so quickly, you often have to remix colors. A simple palette will keep you from forgetting which colors you mixed. I rarely use black, so my palettes must have 3 opposing colors to create a dark color. Red, blue, and yellow, of any type will give a very dark color but you must pay attention to the type of blue or you may create a very warm dark color, or a very cool one, which will matter a great deal to some part of your painting. In addition to the colors, you will need some white. I have learned that the color Naples Yellow is the best color for highlighting parts of a plein air painting, or anything subject that has sunlight hitting it. It mixes in a different way than other yellows or whites and affords a warm touch. Naples Yellow is a good color for skies. You can underpaint a sky with Naples, or highlight clouds.
One of my favorite craft paint colors is Midnight Blue. This color has show up in many of my paintings because it was just so satisfying. It gave me a dark enough color that mixed well with other blues and reds.
One of the things you have to learn over a long time, maybe, and with experience, is how to judge the temperature of a color. I still find it a challenge to get this right many times. The basic rule is that cool colors are for distant objects and warmer colors for the foreground. However, there are times when you want to really cool off a shadow in the foreground, to contrast it with a very warm subject matter, such as someone’s face. Not all shadows need to be cool, though. It depends on what kind of mood you are trying to evoke with your work. If you are painting a scene, for instance, of a very hot summer day and someone sitting in a cool pool of water, you’ll want the surrounding elements to evoke heat, even in their shadows, while you keep your cool colors for the water.
What makes a color warm or cool is basically what the color of paint was made with. Cobalt blue is a pretty warm blue. But it works well in skies and water. Mixed with an aqua blue will cool it off, maybe to a neutral hue. Neutrals are good for elements that you don’t want a lot of attention paid to.
This subject should be explored in all your painting experiences.
Using 3 points for accurate drawing
The way I draw an object to get accuracy is a 3-point method that I came up with. There are a lot of measurements of the human anatomy that you might want to learn, but if you just want to get the proportions right on any subject matter, you find your starting point and mark that with your blue paint, then determine the 2nd point as your defining height and mark that point (use one eye and your paint brush handle to determine this measure sometimes). The third point is the width and is based on the second point. You’ll look at the banana, for instance, and determine that the width is maybe 5 times longer than the height. Place your 3rd point there.
When you’ve established these three points then you can use these dimensions to determine all the other lines or spaces. For example, now you’ll notice that the banana has a stem structure to it that is x-amount of length. And you’ll notice that the banana is not smooth but has ridges defining sections of it. So measure by eye the space between the ridges. There is also a tail end to the banana that has a more defined curve. Mark where this curve begins.
Perspective
When you’re painting a realistic image of anything and you want to render it with perspective, you’ll need to determine a horizon line and where the object is to the right or left, or above or below, this horizon line. There are certain rules for creating a good design that are tried and true. The most important one is to not divide your canvas in half. Do not put a horizon line in the middle of the canvas. Once you do that you now have two paintings, not one. There are famous tryptichs that have purposely divided a canvas into thirds. But unless you’re going for that very divided look, take care to place your horizon above or below the centerline. You might not even show an actual horizon line but an insinuated one is just as bad. The viewers eye will either become immediately bored or confused with a split canvas.
Perspective is, in my opinion, most important when dealing with non-organic objects. You can get away with a lot more with organic subject matter. You can say the fruit was rotten and squished. But if the table, bowl or basket is misaligned, you cannot make the viewer (nor yourself) happy with the results. Our eye wants to have what it sees explainable. Even Dali, who lived to confuse the viewers of his works, had very precise perspectives in otherwise skewed scenes.
But maybe you’re not concerned with that. Maybe you want to create something primitive or irregular. Then you might want to consider using no perspective at all – just flat images with no dimensionalities or shadows. There are many great examples of this throughout history.
Still life with fruit
Choosing your subject subjectively
When choosing your subject matter, whether it’s fruit or anything else, you should go for things that really interest you, even excite you or cause strong feelings in you. Fruits are perfect for still life because there are so many of them, such an array of colors and shapes and textures, as well as symbolic meanings. The age of a fruit is important as well as whether it is whole or cut up. I find the color of fruits to be very passionate and wonderful. The blush on a pear is a precious thing. The delicate colorations of a peach cannot be found anywhere else. The complimentary colors on a mango are rich and vibrant. They can also be used in conjunction with other subjects, such as dishes or florals or people, but they tend to steal the show. (see Monet’s fruit)
Using fruit for practice will help you understand the gradual layering and textures needed to create realistic looking human subject paintings. Painting humans can be very very complex. This is good practice for that because it will help you to look at your subject more objectively while being very passionate about it at the same time. You can be entranced with the way sunlight sits on your subject matter while at the same time you examine exactly how it affects the structure and surface of your subject. To do this well, you need to be able to have both the passion and the dispassion working simultaneously in your brain. Yes, it can make you crazy. (see Van Gogh’s face)
Looking at your object objectively
After you’ve selected your subject matter for its emotional appeal to you, then your eye must become objective in order to determine how you’ll handle the painting of it. This is not always easy to do when the subject matter is of special importance to you. Again, this is why fruit is great for practicing on. If you are trying to establish the coloration of your newborn baby’s cheeks, you will have a harder time distancing yourself from the subject. But the same sublety of color can be found in fruit and will train your eye to make good decisions.
The first thing you want to study is the structure. It seemed round at first glance but is it really? Is it partially round? Just what is the depth of that stem? Are there structural details you want to enhance? Is it in one piece or is it cut up into sections?
Next you’ll examine it’s surface. Texture is the key thing here. Is it smooth, like an apple? And shiny? Or dull and fuzzy like a peach? Or smooth and dull like a banana? Are there age spots on it or unripe areas? The next part of this examination is to look for reflections, reflective surfaces and the gradations of shadow. Reflections will appear on shiny objects, as we know. But reflective surfaces are the surfaces closest to the subject that add some kind of color to the subject, such as a yellow tablecloth on a red apple. Having these elements in your work is what can make it very special. Light bounces around in many ways on things.
After you’ve studied these things, look at details you want to have in your painting. You can add or remove as many details as you wish. If there is a decorative texture in a tablecloth, you can recreate this or not. If there is a blemish on a fruit, you can decide to delete this also. If you’ve cut up a fruit and there are seeds, you may not want to count how many seeds there are and look at all their angles and shapes.
Color for perspective/depth/shading/highlights
As we talked about before, studying warm and cool colors is an ongoing thing because mixtures of color will produce a wide range that you’ll have to decide about as to whether they’re warm or cool. Warm colors generally are used as foreground colors while cooler colors are used as background or shadow colors. There are times when you even want to cool down the sun in a landscape painting if the emphasis is not on the sun. The color yellow is tricky to use as it will come forward very easily when you want to distance it. Blue colors are also tricky for seeming to look cool when, in fact, they are warm. And then the surrounding colors will affect how strong a color becomes, also. A blue surrounded by orange will always look bluer than one surrounded by greens.
When you’re examing your subject for its shadowy areas, you’re going to want to determine how dark the darkest shadow is and decide how to mix that color. Maybe you want to mix a deep blue and a red to create a dark purple for the shadows. If that is too purple or too warm a color, adding some yellow or more of the blue might achieve what you want.
This is also the time you might want to establish the shape and direction of the shadows your subject is making on the surfaces. If there are reflections of your subject in something like a glass, you’ll want to note this, too.
Base colors
When painting fruit, you need to establish the base color before any other. Once the base is found, then you can add the layers of color that will show its ripeness or lack of ripeness, its contours, and the light falling on it or reflecting from it.
The base color does not necessarily have to be that of the actual subject. You might want a different shade of red on an apple to compliment another element of your picture. You can do this. But just make sure the base color is painted first before defining anything else. It is very awkward to try and paint the base color after you’ve done some of the shadows or details.
When applying the base color, you don’t need to apply it evenly all over the subject. You could let some of the background come through or start defining your shape with it. For a decorative piece of work, though, you might just want an even color with stylized details.
Textures
The textures of fruit are the most intriguing part about painting fruit. It is fun to find those textures through your various mediums and surfaces. The fuzziness of a peach, the bumpiness of an orange, the sheen to an apple are achieved with many different techniques.
Wet/dry, rough/smooth, reflective surfaces & reflected light, all these are part of the surface of your subject and need to be handled in different ways.
One way to work out the surface of a peach, for instance, is to use an old thick DRY brush with fairly evenly smooshed bristles and do some stippling. You can mix a couple colors unevenly to achieve this more quickly, so your red and yellow might go on in uneven ways. Keep the amount of paint on the brush very light. Then you lightly dab at the surface over and over again. You’ll know when to quit when you start seeing a fuzzy sort of effect develop. Then don’t forget to stop! Overworking a painting is very easy to do. You should also try doing this in layers, allowing one to dry before doing it more. It only takes minutes for the paint to dry. If you have to put the brush in water for a while, dry it pretty thoroughly before starting again.
Sometimes the effect you’re after is not about the color. I learned a good lesson once when someone asked me to paint a dresser a "butter" color. I thought this would be no problem until I started trying to find a butter color. After some frustration at finding that all shades of yellow and white were not really working, a friend suggested that maybe it was the shinyness of the butter that makes it look like butter. And they were right. There’s a special sort of sheen to butter that makes it buttery. It can be many shades of yellow but if the sheen isn’t there, it doesn’t look right. This sheen was achieved by using a satin finish paint.
Drawing from nature
Observing light/shadow/shapes
Many books and teachers talk about the light. Light is the all important component to any piece of artwork. Many a good composition is lost from not handling light correctly. But the lack of light, or shadows and shapes are equally important. There are shadows on shadows sometimes. And there are shapes in the shadows that become objects unto themselves sometimes. And shape is what the painting is really all about. Light just points the way. Light directs the eye.
Light is what gives a painting the mood you want. Shadows are what give it structure. Forgetting either makes for a picture that is difficult to understand.
Both highlights and shadows have color in them and are rarely all white or all black. Black and white should be used alone only for the dramatic finish. The colors of light and shadow are as many as there are subjects. Lay in bed one morning and look at the shadows in your room and you’ll start to see how many different colors they can be. Look at the shadows on shadows for especially intriguing images and color variations. A reflected shadow of a warm hue on top of a cool shadow creates a drama that can be very special.
When defining your light source, you will want to carefully decide whether this is a very warm, very cool or somewhat neutral light source. Think about the light on a rainy day and how it is more gray than yellow. Think about the light from your bedroom lamp and how very yellow it can be. Think about the light from an overhead light. It might almost be blue.
I’ve found that the best light for painting plein air has been in November (in WNC) because the sun tends to swing around rather slowly in a wide arc instead of going right overhead. And in this area we are fortunate to have warm days in November that are fairly bug-free. So take advantage of this month as much as you can.
Choosing elements
Looking out at a landscape or a rural scene or an industrial scene or a city scene, you’ll find inspiration and want to capture it. But then you start to notice all the details involved in that scene. Some become very distracting. Some are completely unnecessary to the theme of the painting. It is the choices you make about the elements that will give you a good or bad composition. If a horse is looking to the right and standing on the right side of the picture, you’ll send the viewers’ gazes right out of the painting if you choose to depict the scene accurately. But turn the horse around and you’ll keep the viewer looking in the right directions.
You can also choose to eliminate objects that seem too distracting, or too repetitive, or just don’t matter to you. Maybe a picture of a tractor seems attractive, but the gas can next to it is not going to add to the mood. Look through the gas can or turn it into a bucket or a chicken instead.
In our still lifes here in class, we’re limiting the number of items we want to paint for simplicity. But slice open an orange and suddenly you have a very intricate object to deal with. You still have to decide what elements you want in your painting. Do you care if it looks wet or dry? Is it dripping onto the plate? Think quickly and decide quickly. Your instincts will often be right. For those who have trouble deciding things quickly, try looking at art books for ideas on how you’d like to construct a composition. Sketch out an idea beforehand. And remember what it is you want to really focus on, and what you want your viewers to focus on.
Technical accuracy
I appreciate technical accuracy. As a former draftsman, accurate work is important for many reasons. But to create art, a combination of accuracy and artistry can give a painting impact. Audobon became famous for his accurate representations of birds and floral things. But it was his sense of composition and drama that made his paintings popular through the ages. And he also understood that painting a leaf that has been torn or eaten by bugs or browned with sun is not necessary to a painting about a bird, UNLESS it adds to the overall impact of the work. It is important, however, when doing a technical drawing, to have plants in the picture that the animals would actually be involved with. Putting a zebra in a grove of bamboo would not be accurate, would confuse some people and could actually cause mistaken thinking in some who didn’t know better. There might be a good reason why you’d want the zebra there if it’s an illustration for a book, but as a painting, generally depicting technical accuracy helps the viewer appreciate your work better.
Practicing a little accuracy in your drawing and painting can also help your understanding of the subject, particularly live subjects. It is a great thing to study flora and fauna by drawing them. Once you have studied the wing structure of a bird, then you’ll have a greater understanding about it’s flying motions, it’s gestural behaviors and it’s habits, which will, in turn, make your work more believable. It might also lead you to study the differences in the wing structure of a bat or a butterfly.
Leonardo da Vinci was a great believer in the study of anatomy and other structures. His work, both dramatic and meaningful, was even more special because of the time he took to understand his subject matter. Whether you are painting a pet dog or a flower, it helps a great deal to really look at all the elements of that subject. As an example, if you note that a dog’s tongue is of a certain length and width and thickness, then it will make more sense if it is protruding from its mouth and it is drawn accurately. If you also note that the undercoat (or base color) of the dog is a solid color, then you’ll have a more accurate representation when you start to paint its fur.
But being technically accurate can become too much to deal with, and can also take away from a painting sometimes. You may want to accurately depict the main subject and just paint general shapes and shadows in the background. If you try to paint all the details, it might detract from the overall look of the painting.
It is my experience that most viewers of your work will want some sort of background. I have often done an illustration without the background at all and people are forever commenting that it needs a background (or foreground). The main thing with creating a backdrop for your subject is to make sure the elements lead to your subject or the focus of your work. There are a lot of subliminal ways to have extraneous objects "point" in a certain direction, which will lead the viewer’s eye in the right direction.
Learning structure / Observing changes
To me, painting is always about learning and experimenting. You may paint the same subject over and over again, but the light will never be the same and some subjects will change in shape, age, direction, or many other characteristics. A butterfly, wings up, is very different from a butterfly, wings down. And your moods will change, too.
The first time you paint a subject, you need to discover its true structure. Many things, such as fuzzy pets or vine-covered barns, are covered in things that obscure their structures. When painting an old barn, for instance, it helps to actually walk up to and even inside the barn and sketch out structural details that you’ll reference later. When this is not possible, then understanding basic structure is important. You should pay attention to why certain shadows show up in some areas and not others. When painting an animal or human, you need to understand some anatomy in order to show their function better.
In painting fruit, you should look to see if the inner structure affects the outer structure very much. For instance, the inside of an orange does not really affect the skin of the orange that much. An old orange will have begun to split and change inside while its skin remains the same. But this is not the case with apples. The skin on an apple, being much thinner, is quickly affected by the apple inside. And the core of an apple is hard, rigid. The mango has a huge seed inside that creates the shape of the whole thing. No matter how ripe a mango gets, the shape stays pretty much the same.
Inorganic structure, such as the structure of the containers, depends on the material its made from. A glass object may have many more rounded parts than a metal object of the same type. A wooden object will have a lot more texture than other materials and more surfaces to deal with. A basket is composed of many parts all interwoven together. Each part is both organic and inorganic in the way you have to deal with them. There will be edges that have been cut with sharp tools and are very straight and inorganic. But then there will be rounded corners or the texture of wood that is organic.
When you’re studying structure, it helps to think about how much of any one texture you have in your painting. You might have too much fuzziness or too many smooth and reflective items. This will help you decide on your composition elements.
