Backstory: I’ve never really been good at art. I remember taking a class in college. The first day we had to draw still life of fruit in a bowl. It was bad. Horrible. No good. Judging by the others in class, I was already out of my league in a 101 class, so I dropped it and didn’t look back.
Fast forward 25 years, my husband has been really getting into plein air oil paintings. He bought a couple paintings from a local artist that we both really treasure. (Link to Kevin Kluever’s facebook page) So I decide to learn how to paint so I can make some of these myself.
About a month ago, I read somewhere about painting those types of scenes. The first step was to sketch out on the canvas the basics of the scene to be painted. Oh. So to get to even the first step, I’d have to learn to sketch and draw. I found this book, You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less Paperback by Mark Kistler and I enjoyed it. What I liked was it helped understand some of the basics of drawing, dimensions, shading, etc without getting overly technical.
Questions:
So what should my next step be?
Should I just get some paint and canvas and start messing around from there?
Are there other books to get me better educated on this?
I know there are other things I’ll need to learn (color theory, composition, etc) that the first book didn’t teach me at all. (There are also some local classes, but with a busy couple months of traveling up ahead, it’s better to do this more autonomously.)
Should I go into acrylics or oils first?
Any other tips for a hobby artist?
I don’t have any other advice other than what my professors told me in the Scenery and Costume Design class I took. “Draw what you see, not what’s really there.” If you find that helpful let me know because it never really seemed to help me.
I do know that acrylics dry much faster than oil so they’re a good way to go if you want a minimum of mess, but if you want to really work on blending then oil is more useful.
Watching Wartime Farm on PBS, I was surprised to see their “War Artist” blocking in his painting with what looked like dark undercoatings before applying lighter colors over them. I always assumed you just painted on the blank white canvas, as I indeed have always done in my attempts to create a picture.
I’ve tried researching this on the Internet, but haven’t found anything that explains it in sufficient detail for me to give it a try.
What exactly is the advantage of this technique? Does it give some greater depth the scene you’re depicting or make the top layers of paint more brilliant?
If you are just trying to take it up as a hobby, try getting Bob Ross’ books or DVD’s. They are simplified ways of doing landscape painting. Plus his oil paints are specially made for applying wet paint to wet paint without it getting mixed to mud color.
For more serious questions, what exactly are you wanting to know or try?
I would guess it’s a layering technique. If you paint a dark color first and then layer lighter colors on top, some of the darker color comes through and changes the way the lighter color looks. As an example, if you want to paint a person who has a reddish tone to their skin, you might lay down some red first and then your skin color and some of the red will show through in a way that it doesn’t if you just mix it into the skin color.
Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack in my questions up there. I’ve learned some basics in drawing and I want to eventually make painting similar to the ones linked above, what should the next step(s) be? What books/videos/info should I digest that won’t completely overwhelm me as I start going down that road?
As Dave Lister would say, “I can’t help it - I went to Art College!”
I specifically avoided painting with oils and arcylics in college because canvases were involved. My painting instructor herself was a watercolour wonder, and since I am anosmic, the smell of the watercolour paper when wet didn’t bother me.
The acrylics ladz not only had to learn how to stretch their own canvas at least once during their first semester, but they also had to prepare every canvas by coating it with Gesso. This creamy white concoction shrinks as it dries, so you have to be careful that your canvas doesn’t warp. Clamping it down prior to preparation, gesso-ing the front and the back, or both were recommended solutions for this.
I have to imagine this is similar to the technique I use for painting 28mm Space Marines made by Citadel Miniatures: even though my goal is to paint a bright red Blood Angel, the undercoat I prefer is a stark white primer. This makes warm colours brighter, but more importantly interacts physically with the acrylic paints I use. Trying to slap thinned Citadel acrylic paint on bare plastic would not likely lead to a pretty result.
I know about gesso, and I understand the need to use white primer with colors like red. I’m just surprised that darker colors can be used as well.
Now that I think about it, I believe the Russian agent in Bridge of Spies used the same technique in painting Tom Hanks’ portrait: lighter colors drybrushed over a matte black background.
I’m interested mainly in doing aviation art (lots of sky) and historical scenes (lots of landscape, horses, armor, heraldry).
The term of art for what you’re describing is underpainting.
When I was taught acrylic portraiture, we did our underpainting in fully-saturated contrasting colours (so blue to green hues under pink-brown skin areas). Especially if you use a more painterly style, more impressionistic, or don’t use completely opaque layers, I found it adds depth and can make the overpainting really pop. But for oil a lot of it gets done in greys as grisaille
Grisaille can also be done in a thinned mix of burnt sienna and burnt umber, which adds a wonderful layer of warmth to even cold colored oil paintings, and gives a rough guide to where you want your shading to be. Because it is thin, it dries relatively quickly, allowing you to overpaint in short order, while your idea is still fresh.
As a side note to the OP, I was in your same boat a couple of years ago… I’d always viewed myself as having limited visual artistic ability, primarily because I could not draw well, but I had always wanted to paint. So I just started painting, with minimal sketching involved, and found that I had a decent eye for color and composition, and drawing for painting purposes was different than sketching. Once I had that realization, it became much less intimidating, and I became more confident in expressing what I wanted.
I wish I has started in acrylic rather than oil, because the drying time is much shorter, which makes it a bit more forgiving. If you do want to paint in a certain style, it helps to do some research into the what’s, how’s, and why’s of the painters in that style. Looking at the link to the artist you enjoy, he seems to tend towards Impressionism, and there are plenty of resources out there as to what made that group tick. Since you are just jumping in, you can go a bit towards moderately priced materials, which may take some of the pressure off of you. You can buy pre-primed ready to use canvases from most chain craft stores, as well as student grade paint and brushes.
If you do have a resource around, it does help to take a class to learn some of the technique fundamentals, so you are not trying to fumble around in the dark on this.
First, if you want to paint real art forget Bob Ross.
As for instructional classes, unless you get really lucky they might not help that much. The goal of most short term classes is to come away with a nice piece. What you will learn is how to paint that piece but won’t be able to transfer those skills to any subject. The only good classes (imho) are long term ones.
Your money would be much better spent attending open painting sessions. Almost every town has a place where local artists meet once or twice a week to paint together and share ideas and help. Many have live models. There is usually a $5 drop in fee.
I don’t suggest acrylics for those just learning. But be warned if you do that you need to buy good quality paints. Student or cheap acrylics are thin and won’t cover well. It’s hard to get a decent painting with them. If you want something to dry fast try guache.
It’s beyond the scope of this post to teach you drawing but drawing is about proportion. Don’t draw what you think you know, draw what you see keeping in mind individual and overall proportion (is the tree twice as tall as the barn or 2 1/2 times as tall?).
You really need to know color theory. Find the best book on it you can.
I think that line might be a bit garbled. My wife is an artist and from what I understand is that a key skill that is difficult to learn is to see what’s really there rather than what you think you see.
That is, the artist has to get around the fact that our brains think in archetypal models, which interferes with seeing what is really there.
One example I can think of is that my wife trying explain to me that in order to paint dark things like shadows and asphalt, what’s really there is a lot of blue. You have to learn to see that and ignore your brain’s idea that those things are black or gray.
I think many beginning artists struggle because they’ll be trying to draw something like a face from real life, and will attempt to draw an eye, but rather than breaking the eye down to the individual linestrokes, curves, and shapes that constitute the whole (each one individually referenced for proportion against the model, and relative to each other), will just recognize “eye”, and then plop down a classic cartoon symmetric football shaped eye on the paper. And then wasting the next 15 minutes filling in the eyelashes, or coloring in the iris, in the process, learning nothing, and demonstrating only that they can do busywork and put together something that remotely resembles “human” on a piece of paper.
This was pretty much my take away from Drawing From The Right Side of the Brain. While I do work in visual arts (photography), I’ve always been a piss poor draftsman. While “draw what you see, not what you think you see” sounds like pseudo philosophical mumbo jumbo, that really is what worked for me. Within a month I went from thinking sketching a recognizale portrait of someone to be pretty much a work of magic, completely unattainable to me, to actually being able to sketch a portrait that looked like the person I was sketching. It did take daily practice, and getting out of the habit of drawing reflexively things to look like the archetypal models I had for them, to just trying to copy as best I can what I actually see.
Yeah, I think it was meant to encourage us to ignore things we know to be true. I know the top of a soda can is a circle. But unless I’m drawing from a literal top-down perspective, I don’t see a circle, I see an oval of some type and so on.
I’m a painter, but more importantly I sold art supplies for 12 years. IMHO:
For that style of work, I would recommend against traditional acrylics, ESPECIALLY if plein air is involved. They’re just not suited for outdoor use and dry too quickly for the kind of on-canvas blending you want.
Slow-dry acrylics would work, such as Golden’s OPEN line. You may have difficulty finding instruction familiar with the quirks of this newer medium.
Oils are the way to go. Consider water-soluble oils to make cleanup easier and safer. Don’t let amy traditional oil painter poo-poo them, they’re fine.
For technique, professional instruction is best. Try asking the Kluever guy if he teaches. Try workshops with a local artist group. Find out if there’s a plenty air group that goes out together.
If books are your thing, see if there’s an art supplier that still carries books and thumb through looking for that style.