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Mar 7, 2010 Drawing, Painting
Whether you’re drawing or painting, you need to consider the composition of your work. Composition is the arrangement of the visual elements on your picture plane; or, where you put things. You need to take into consideration the relationship of the elements to each other, and the relationship of the elements to the edge of your drawing or painting.
Composition can help communicate feeling and meaning. The arrangement of objects can be balanced and harmonious and convey a sense of calm. Or they can be awkward and convey a sense of tension. You need to use this to your advantage!
Even if you’re working with a single subject, like a portrait, you need to think about composition. Where will the face go on the page? In the centre, off to the side, near the edge? Each arrangement will slightly alter the feel of the finished piece.
But how can you figure out the best composition? That’s where thumbnail sketches come in.
Thumbnails are small-scale drawings that let you play around with composition without investing a huge amount of time and effort into a single artwork.
How to use Thumbnails
First of all, you want to consider all the elements that will be in your piece. Below are some examples of thumbnails I did for an upcoming painting. I knew I was working with a horizon, a tree, two giraffes and the sun. My goal was to find the best arrangement for these elements.
Thumbnail drawings should only be a few inches big, but make sure they are the same scale as your finished piece. I know that my painting will be three feet by two feet, so I made each thumbnail three inches by two inches. This way, I know that the elements of the painting will fit into the thumbnail the same way as the painting.
Once you know what you’re working with, and you draw yourself several to-scale boxes, start playing around. Try as many different arrangements you can think of. This lets you see exactly how things will relate to eachother without just imagining it. This is important because artists are visual and need to see.
Choosing a Thumbnail
Pick a thumbnail that feels like it works. This really depends on the feelings you’re going for in your work. This is the thumbnail I chose for my composition. It is balanced and harmonious, each element is comfortably placed and nothing feels awkward. It also follows the rules of thirds.
We all know how it feels to suddenly get the perfect idea for your next piece. You’re excited and anxious to get going. It can be tempting to jump right in. But you’ll find that your finished piece will be better if you take a few minutes to do a little planning and find the best composition. The effort is well worth the result!
Recent Entries
Mar 3, 2010 Painting
One of the first decisions you will need to make as an artist learning to paint is which paint to use. There are three main choices, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. First let’s look at the pros and cons of each, then I’ll give you my opinion on where it’s best to start.
Watercolour
These paints are water soluble and clean up easily with warm water and a bit of soap. Even after the paint has dried completely, it can be re-activated with water. This means that you brushes will survive if you forget to wash them right away after a painting session! This also means that your paints can be used again and again, without any wastage. The most common painting surface for these paints is watercolour paper.
Watercolours are said to be the hardest paints to master. Because of their transparency, you can’t just paint over an area if you make a mistake. Watercolour techniques involve working in layers from light to dark, and you can use water to dilute the paints and create transparent washes.
Acrylics
Acrylics are also a water-based paint, but unlike watercolours, once they dry they stay dry. The brushes clean easily with soap and water, but must be cleaned right away. If paint dries on your brush, it will not come off! This also means that any paint left on your palette at the end of a session will dry out and become unusable unless you can seal it.
Acrylic paints have a very shiny, plasticy finish. They dry flat, in spite of any texture they might have when wet. They also dry slightly darker, making it difficult to mix the colours for an already dry section of a painting.
One great thing about acrylics is their versatility. When diluted with water, you can create washes much like watercolours. When used straight from the tube, they behave more like oil paints. They also dry very quickly, letting you re-work a painting without having to wait. Of all the paints, acrylics are the most immediate.The drawback, however, is that this makes them difficult to blend smoothly.
Oils
Oil paints behave very differently from watercolours and acrylics. They are oil-based, which makes clean-up more complicated. You will need to have some kind of solvent or turpentine to clean your brushes. This substance can be dangerous (flammable) and needs to be disposed of properly.
The other difference in oils is that they take a long time to dry. In fact, they don’t actually dry at all. With watercolours and acrylics, the drying process involves the evaporation of the water within the paint. Oil paints, on the other hand, actually have a chemical reaction with oxygen, which causes them to harden. It can take weeks, to months, to even a year for to complete the process. Often, your paintings will feel dry to the touch within a day or two, but will not be dry underneath.
The great thing about this is that it lets you paint wet into wet for extended periods of time. It also means that if you forget to wash your brushes, they will probably be salvageable the next day!
Recommendation
The most important differences in oils, watercolours and acrylics to me are their drying times and the clean-up. But how do you know where to start?
This really depends on what you’re wanting to do. If you want to paint quickly and have a lot of versatility, go for acrylics. If you want to be able to work slowly and are committed to the solvents, try oils. If you like the idea of building layers, give watercolours a try.
I really believe it’s important to play and I would urge all of you to play around with each of these types of paints. You will learn the most this way and the experience will help you decide which you like better. You don’t need to spend a lot of money to do this; you can usually pick up student sets for cheap. Until you know what you like, that’s all you need.
I started painting with acrylics. The clean-up was convenient and the immediacy of the paint allowed me to learn quickly. I’ve since dabbled in watercolours and done some oil painting as well. I found that the transition from acrylics to the other paints was very easy. While watercolours aren’t for me, I there are elements of acrylics and oils that I love.
If you’re really stuck, try acrylics and go from there! Don’t forget to check out my introduction to colour theory.
Happy painting!
Feb 28, 2010 Colour Theory
Colour. It’s such a huge topic that I’m not even sure where to start!
So far we’ve focused on learning basic drawing skills, which are essential to most visual art forms. Look at any accomplished painter. Beneath the pigment is a solid understanding of shape, form, line, and values.
Learn to… Art! will continue to build on those drawing skills, but I am also going to expand the blog’s focus to include colour theory and painting.
The beauty of colour is that it adds another layer, another dimensin to your work. Colour can portray emotion, mood, atmosphere, and depth.
But colour can be mysterious and intimidating, especially for an artist who is used to black and white. The best thing you can do is to jump right in and start experimenting! Student sets of paints, pastels, and coloured pencils are a great way to get your feet wet and discover what you like.
Let’s look at a few basics to introduce you to colour theory.
Important Colour Terms
When talking about different kinds of colours, it can get a bit confusing. Here are a few of the most important terms.Visit Wetcanvas for a more complete art glossary.
chroma – The relative intensity or purity of a colour. A colour with low chroma is closer to gray; a colour with high chroma would be seen as luminous or intense. Saturation is a related term.
hue – The basic colour name - blue, green, red etc.
intensity – The brilliance of a color.
local color – The color of an object in daylight. The true color, without interpretation or embellishment.
neutral - Strictly, an achromatic color, a neutral gray, white or black. In common usage with painters, the term is used more loosely to describe any of a range of low-chroma colors, near-grays, including browns.
saturation – A similar term to chroma but not exactly synonymous. More correctly it means the amount of colour in relation to its brightness.
shade - A color mixed with black.
subdue - To make less intense. Often used in discussions of color, where a complementary color or gray might be added to lower the chroma.
tint - A color mixed with white. It can also refer to the shift in hue when one color is added to another, for example red tints yellow towards orange. See also shade.
value - The relative lightness or darkness of a color. High value is closer to white, low value is closer to black.
The Colour Wheel
Most of you are probably familiar with the colour wheel, but we’ll talk about it quickly. The colour wheel is a diagram that shows how colours relate to each other.Some colour wheels are quite simple while others are more complex. Knowing the colours and their respective place on the wheel can help us make decisions when it comes to choosing our palette. The three types of colours represented in the colour wheel are primaries, secondaries and tertiaries.
primary color - The three colors from which all other colors can theoretically be mixed. Red, yellow and blue.
binary (secondary) colors – A color made by mixing two of the primary colors. Examples include green, orange, and purple.
intermediate (tertiary) colors – Made by mixing unequal amounts of primary colors. Between the primary and secondary colors on a color wheel. Examples include red-orange and yellow-green.
The colour wheel can also be useful when it comes to choosing colour combinations like which colours look good together and how colours can be mixed. Here are some colour combinations represented on the wheel.
analogous colors - Any two or more colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel. Can be considered families of colors e.g. the “warm” colors red, orange, yellow, and the “cool” colors green, blue, violet.
complementary colors – Visually, complements are the colours directly opposite one another on the colour wheel, e.g. magenta and green. In paints, the colour or colors that mix with another to form a neutral gray; these two colours are called a complementary pair
split complements - For a given color, the two others that are immediately adjacent to the opposite color on a color wheel. For example, the split complements of green are crimson and red-violet.
Warm vs. Cool Colours
To further complicate matters, colours are divided into two groups: warm and cool. Warm colours include the reds, oranges and yellows. Cool colours are the blues, greens and violets.
This is important to remember when it comes to mixing colours. For example, you can get two types of red paint: cadmium and alizarin. Cadmium red is a warm red, with more yellow in it while alizarin crimson is cool with more blue. If you want to mix a purple, you need to use the red that is already cool. If you tried to make purple using cadmium red, you would end up with a muddy version of purple.
Colour temperature is also useful when it comes to depth. Visually, warm colours come forward and cool colours fall back. To create depth in your work, the closer something is to a viewer, the warmer in temperature it should be.
If you’re interested in exploring colour, the best thing you can do is start messing around and see what happens. I’d love to hear about your experiences!
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Feb 24, 2010 Art General, Creativity
I’ve been sick for the past couple of days. First it was a sore throat, then a cough, and now sinus congestion. Not fun!
Because I’ve generally felt like crap, I’ve had to put a few of my projects on hold for a little while so that I can rest up. Which annoys me.
I, and many other artists, put a lot of pressure on myself. To produce work, to research, to learn, to blog, to network, to teach, to market. It’s overwhelming and exhausting. At any one time, I might be working on ten different projects, with another thirty floating around somewhere in my brain. Maybe I’ll get to them tomorrow, maybe in five years, maybe never. Either way, there is always a feeling of having not enough time to do everything I want to do.
Any time taken away from the pursuit of art is a frustration. It’s an opportunity that might be missed or an idea that may never come to fruition.
Whenever I feel this kind of pressure building up, I try to remind myself of all the things I’ve already done.
It’s easy to become overwhelmed and frustrated. It’s easy to focus on all the things we have yet to accomplish. And it’s easy to compare ourselves to those we see as more successful. But what about the things you’ve already done? Have you given yourself enough credit for those things?
No matter where you are in your art journey, you have accomplished something. For many people, the decision to pursue art is a major accomplishment in itself!
Take some time to think about the things you have done and what they mean in your life. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else, just focus on yourself.
- What obstacles have you overcome?
- What challenges have you faced?
- What are your successes?
- What do you feel proud of?
Before you turn your attention back to all your future projects, give yourself a pat on the back for all the things you’ve already accomplished!
Feb 21, 2010 Drawing
If the pencil is sturdy, reliable and precise, charcoal is like its wild counterpart: bold, daring and dramatic. Blacker than any pencil and rich in texture, drawing with charcoal is an altogether different experience.
Don’t get me wrong: charcoal is a versatile medium and you can achieve extremely sensitive, realistic drawings using it. There is just something about taking up that messy stump of charcoal that frees us to get big, expressive and gestural.
Types of Charcoal
Charcoal comes in a few different forms. You can get pressed charcoal that comes as a compressed stick. These can be hard, producing a grayer shade, or soft and very deep black. The softer the charcoal, the easier it will be to smudge. This is the kind of charcoal that will get your hands, your paper, and quite possibly your clothing and face dirty.
This pressed charcoal also comes in pencil form. This can be useful for detailed drawings because you can sharpen it to a fine point. It’s also much less messy!
A third type of charcoal is willow or vine charcoal. This comes in the form of an actual branch: it’s long, cylindrical and wiggly. Willow charcoal is very soft and produces a delicious dove grey. It has one of the nicest textures to draw with, but is also very smudgy.
Why Charcoal?
Charcoal functions in much the same way as a pencil. You can draw, shade and blend. But there’s something psychologically different about using charcoal. It allows you to get more expressive and work bigger without getting caught up in the details. Charcoal sticks especially, because they don’t have a fine point, can force you to focus on large shapes and general contours.
What to Draw
You can draw and shade anything in charcoal the same way you would a pencil. Charcoal also lends itself well to more expressive types of shading like hatching.
My favorite thing to do with charcoal, though, is gesture drawings. Charcoal is perfect for making the large, sweeping strokes needed to capture a gesture.
It’s always nice to have a variety of drawing tools to choose from. The pencil is perfect for detailed renderings, but when it comes to expressive drawings I always reach for the charcoal!
Please share your experiences! Do you prefer pencil or charcoal? Does it depend on what you’re drawing?
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