Tips and Suggestions to Painting

Tips & Suggestions:

-       Have confidence when you paint. Trust your creative instincts. Paint with expression and voice.

-       Make intentional brushstrokes by putting thought into each stroke, each decision. Make each brushstroke count.

-       Save your darkest darks and lightest lights for the final stages of the painting.

-       Apply strokes in the direction of the form - to help describe the form, imply motion or direction. 

-       You are building a “mosaic” of brushstrokes. Brushstrokes on top of brushstrokes. Smaller strokes on top of larger ones.

-       Apply confident and bold brushstrokes. Do not “dab at” the canvas with a million strokes.  Load your brush with paint, apply a stroke, and then go back to your palette, pick up more paint, and apply another stroke.  Exercise thoughtfulness.

-       One confident brushstroke says more than a hundred smoothed-out strokes.

-       Think of creative ways to apply paint. You can apply: a thick stroke from point A-B, a single dab of paint, scrub at the canvas with an old brush, dry-brush the paint, a palette knife or a shoe or whatever else.

-       Use larger brushes during the beginning stages and progressively smaller ones toward the latter stages. You can get more detail than you may think with using a large brush.  Push your dexterity and skill with a larger brush. 

-       “Fat over Lean”: Use a thinner paint mixture (paint with thinner or linseed oil) during the beginning stages and progressively less medium toward the latter stages. Near the end of the painting, you may find that you don’t need any medium at all. Thin paint is called, “lean” and paint with less or no medium is called, “fat”. Hence, “fat over lean”.

-       At the beginning, when blocking-in your drawing, break your values down to three values: darks, mid-tones and lights. Treat them as abstract shapes.

-       Here are some of the 3’s in painting (push yourself to discover other 3’s):

·      Lights - Mid-tones - Darks

·      Foreground - Mid-ground - Background

·      Tight/Detail - Midrange/Structure - Loose/Abstraction

·      Focal point - Main subject - Overall impact
Shapes: Small, Medium, Large
Image, Message, Context

·      Fine rendered detail - Modeled form - Suggestive space

·      Punchy Color - Muted Color - Grays/Browns