Thanks everyone!
Any recommendations?
Agreed. Color theory is a must.
I’ve never used water-soluble. If you go with trad oils, clean with white spirit or other mineral spirits. The paint will collect at the bottom of the yar, so you can drain off the cleaner and reuse it. Always wear rubber gloves (I learned that the hard way), and always paint in a place with good ventilation.
You need to learn how to use oils, or your canvas will rot and your paint may crackle and fall off. A coat of “gesso” is a must, but that could be anything that seals the canvas from the oils in the paint. Some even paint on foam boards to skip this issue. When painting, paint from thin to thick, which means you begin painting with paint diluted with turpentine and then gradually mix in oil and lay off the turpentine for the later stages. This is to ensure your outer layers of paint don’t dry faster than the inner layers.
I’d also recommend to not stick to only one technique or style, especially not when learning. Get down your basics and refine. That’s usually how a painter paints anyway: Basic blocks, colors and gradients, refined into figures, color-play, light and shadow.
Last tip: Oils are good if you like to work the paint over a longer time. It’s not good for the impatient.
It’s been about a year and a half since I posted this and thought I’d give a bit of an update as quite a bit has changed since then. (Warning: Kinda long and bloggy ahead.)
I did go through the book Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain mentioned by Inner Stickler. This is one of those books that is packed with the information that really helped retrain my brain. Still making sure I’m drawing what I actually see and not what I think I see/know is still a work in progress, but that has been indispensable.
After that, I took a one day oil painting class. I liked it but didn’t find it to be exceptionally practical. The fumes, the set up, the clean up, all of that wasn’t appealing. Then I got a set of Prismacolor pencils and started working on color.
My husband signed us up for a weekly plein air watercolor class back in April. To be honest, I hadn’t really considered watercolors but figured since the class would also teach about plein air, that it would be a good stepping stone. The teacher was amazing and taught all levels and was really encouraging. In hind sight, a simple watercolor class would have been easier, but I’m glad I did it.
Right at the same time, I learned about the #100dayproject. This involved getting an Instagram account and posting a new piece of art every day for 100 days with that hashtag. Except the first day, all of the other days were watercolors (or watercolors and ink). What I learned from this was that a routine of creating art everyday REALLY helped me grow. Are they all good? Gosh no. Some are embarrassingly bad, but I posted them anyways because it’s been a great way to document progress. I started back on April 3rd and I haven’t missed a day since.
I found some youtube videos that I would follow by an artist named Peter Scheeler. Really nice ink and wash style that I just was gravitated towards. If anyone is looking to dabble in ink and wash, these are great tutorials for it. I did quite a few of these during the 100 day challenge.
The motivation to not miss a day meant that I had to have things to paint. After a while I started running low on ideas. I walked up to a local restaurant and took a couple reference pictures and painted from those. Inspired by that, I thought about doing a series of paintings of landmark buildings from each of the neighborhoods in Northeast Minneapolis. The next morning, after walking the dogs, my husband and I went out with a checklist of each of the neighborhoods and started collecting pictures. It was 6:30am and I could tell my husband wasn’t feeling it, so I looked for a nearby restaurant that was open for a breakfast break. We found a waffles n ice cream joint and while waiting for our food to be made, I wondered over to the community board. On the board was a call out for community artists to submit works for each neighborhood for a 13 month calendar (+1 for the cover). It was exactly what my plan was. The deadline was in a month and so now I had further motivation. The contest allowed a submission for each neighborhood (up to 14). Some of them, not so great, but I got em all done. The judging took a while and I got an email stating that two months would be me and what’s my address for the prize money. Holy. Poop.
Since then, I’ve still been taking watercolor classes (just regular ones and not plein air). These have been great. As I’m getting more objective feedback and am growing.
Last month, I also took some other classes. The first was a water mixable oils class. OK, these were mentioned upthread and are really an amazing product. Easy cleanup, less smell, mostly the same oil style. I bought some for home and using this book in tandem which has been perfect: The Oil Painting Course You’ve Always Wanted: Guided Lessons for Beginners and Experienced Artists by Kathleen Lochen Staiger. I’m not done, but I highly recommend this book if for the color mixing/theory part alone. It’s interesting to hear artists talk about how difficult watercolors are and now I’m understanding how easy oils are in comparison. So much more control and more time to think about what to do instead of trying to wrangle a wash.
I also started taking classes at the local Atelier. It was a beginning drawing class for 15 weeks for 2.5 hours each class. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but assumed it would cover the basics like breaking down an object into shapes, shading, lighting, etc. Nope. It was all sight-size drawing. This meant that the artist would pick a plaster mold of a body part and a sheet of charcoal paper that they would work on for the whole 15 weeks. By the end of the 15 weeks, I would have learned how to sight size and have a drawing of a pair of lips. To sight size at this atelier, I set up the plaster piece and the paper next to each other. Then walk about 10 feet away, find a point on the mold where a change was happening (shade, shape, etc) and then figure out where to plot that point on the neighboring paper. Then repeat. At the end of the first class, the teacher checked my work, everything was good and I could continue next week from where I left off. She reminded everyone to take pictures of where the lights were, where the easels were, where our footing was, and to make sure to wear the same shoes for the next 14 weeks. The next week I got to class and spent about 25 minutes putting the easel and lights back to the exact spot they were. I had everything checked over by the teacher before I started to make more dots and it was all good. After about an hour and about 12 more dots, she stopped by again. All of the new dots were correctly placed, but one of the dots from last week was 1/8th of an inch off and that needed to be fixed before continuing. I said ok, packed up my stuff and haven’t returned.
I had a singing teacher once whose mantra was “perfect is the enemy of good”. I wanted to add “perfect is the enemy of fun”. That class wasn’t fun for me. There were some people in there that this was their 8th or 10th year of doing this and love it. There are others who think Twilight was a good book series. Different strokes.
What’s next? Well, I’m still doing my watercolor classes. I signed up for a plein air event in August just to push myself. I also plan on doing the neighborhood calendar challenge again. And then there’s also learning the water mixable oils which is a fun and completely different mindset from how watercolors work.
So thanks everyone for some great advice!
Ohmigosh, your pieces are so lovely! I especially like the shadow work on this one! You go dude!
I’m a big fan of the Grisaille method, even when working digitally. But the basics of course are light, shadow, form and color, which really are best learned by painting from life (as you know). Even so, sometimes when we paint from life our eyes and brains work against us; we use local color instead of perceptual color (“Oh, that’s an apple, it has to be red” versus "That’s an apple on a green cloth with a warm yellow light and I have to stop thinking of it as an apple and paint what I actually perceive).
For color and light, I recommend James Gurney’s book “Color and Light”. Some really good insights there.
Thank you so much!
You’re doing great. Practice, practice, practice is my only advice.