Do you feel like the real painting tips you need as a beginner artist are always hidden? That was me once upon a time. Struggling to find my way with fine art painting. That is until I worked with a real teacher who gave me real information. I soaked it up like a sponge! Today I paint and teach full time and love it. That is why I share everything I know with artists all over the world. Let's start the year with five big issues, plus many other tips thrown in too.
A Brief Backstory: My first Impressionist paintings were absolutely horrible. I could not bear to look at them. They were that bad. I had come from a graphic-design art background painting things like posters, travel brochure type artwork and illustration. But I always loved Impressionist painting and I wanted to go into fine art painting properly and I thought it would be easy. It was very hard! It's still hard. My first efforts were really poor and I seemed to spend ages trying to get paintings that looked like I wanted them. You know, light-filled, colourful paintings. But nothing was really happening and this went on for many months, a couple of years even, until I finally latched on to some art workshops where I learned about the notan painting process. I learned about values and it must have just been the right timing because the penny dropped, as they say, and I've never looked back. The change was practically overnight. It was like the doors had been opened and I could advance into the world of Impressionist fine art painting. After all, I know how frustrating it is and that is why I do these lessons and I share just about everything I can think of. I really don't hold anything back, because back then it seemed like everyone was holding this information back and you were only given a few morsels, never invited to the table, as they say. I think that's changed now. Past Painting Nightmares As I look back at few of the paintings that I did in the past I mostly notice that there's no real light at all. Dull light, with a lot of middle values. I have a lot of old painting panels that will never see the light of day. So now we're in the beginning of the year and I wanted to share five painting mistakes to avoid and these are the sort of things that I wish I'd known back then. So I'm going to run through these and maybe they are problems that you are struggling with as well. I'm also going to share a PDF where I'm sharing YouTube videos I've done specifically on these problems and you'll be able to just download that and go and watch those videos as well. It's a simple download, no sign up required. So just click on the. Five painting mistakes and how you can avoid them. Mistake number one is not preparing properly. Poor preparation is always going to be a recipe for disaster and this can include things like not preparing your canvas or painting panel correctly. Make sure it's properly primed if you're doing it yourself. Two coats of gesso primer and that'll give you a good surface to paint on. Make sure the surface is smooth enough, not lots of excess of texture and bumps on it so that it looks like a bit suspect. It's always a good idea to also tone the panel as well so you're not facing the white surface. This can be particularly intimidating for beginners and a good color for landscapes would be a cool red, a burnt sienna. Try to avoid yellow ochre because it's heading towards the yellows and it might make your blues look a little green. Another part of preparation is taking the time to get your setup in your studio correct. Get your materials laid out, get a nice place where you can paint undisturbed. Take a few moments, minutes, hours, whatever it takes to just prepare yourself for painting. Rushing things is not going to help you paint with a calm frame of mind. Choosing the right sort of paint is also a factor. It doesn't have to be artist quality paint. I don't actually recommend that for beginners because it puts a lot of financial pressure on every brushstroke and you don't need that. So a good quality student paint. I have a few examples I can give you in the links in the handout as well. So you want to be able to paint with good quality student paint so you know you're getting the right vibrancy. You're also getting paint that's easy to work. You don't want to fight hard toothpaste like paint. It must be buttery and ready to go straight out the tube. Final word on preparation. Don't worry about mediums. Too much money is spent on expensive mediums and all they do is speed up the drying time and this actually will catch your art if you're painting in oils. Save that money. Get a bottle of cheap linseed oil and that's all you need and spend the saved money on some good brushes. Mistake number two is not getting to grips with color theory. A basic understanding of color mixing. Get yourself a good color wheel and practice mixing your primary colors to get secondary colors. Then practice adding white paint to those colors and see what effect that has on each of those colors. Try to break it up into lightest a bit darker a little darker still and then the original full color. Once you've got a grip on mixing your secondary colors then work into tertiary colors and see how that works out for you and also add some white paint to that as well and see how dramatically white paint can reduce the vibrancy of your color. That's a lesson well worth learning early on. Don't use too many colors. Just start with the primary colors. A cadmium red light, a cadmium yellow lemon or yellow medium and ultramarine blue. Of course some titanium white. Just play around with those colors. Once you feel more comfortable with working with the primaries you can add a few extra colors to them and once again you'll be adding primaries. A warm and cool version of each primary. So a cool blue would be cerulean blue. A cool yellow is lemon yellow and a warm yellow would be something like yellow deep. Alizarin crimson would be the cool red to go with your cadmium red light. And finally burnt sienna and yellow ochre for convenience. Those colors can do any painting you set your mind on. And then spend a bit of time getting to understand values. The lights and darks. There's plenty of materials even on my channel as well to help you understand the values of your colors and understanding how the dark colors make the light stand out and that is how you create light in your painting. Beginners will always underplay values and as you get more experienced and more confident you'll start pushing the contrasts even more to have more impactful paintings. Mistake number three is fear of the brush. You have to master your fears with handling a brush. Fear of the brush always manifests in using a brush that is much too small. We feel that putting tiny brush strokes is actually going to help you avoid making a big mistake. Something that's easy to correct and you work away with little brush strokes. This leads to dull overworked paintings. Lacking emotion, lacking texture and confidence and it really comes through. There's nothing that's going to make a bigger impact, besides values of course, than using a big brush and getting down a big shape. I always recommend with oil paints use long flat bristle brushes and a size six is your workhorse brush for small size paintings. Six by eight, ten by twelve inches. That's what you're working with to learn your trade as a painter. So make big marks with the brush especially at the beginning stage and the middle stages of your painting. Right at the end you can add the little dots and dashes for highlights and accents. Actually, don't even worry about that at this stage. All you've got to focus on is making a great start and developing your blocking in stage of the painting and this means big, strong brush strokes. There's plenty in the supporting videos as well about how to hold your brush and also cleaning your brushes so don't lose any sleep on that. It's very simple. Mistake number four is lacking patience. Slowing down and giving the process of painting and creativity its own time is probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks. How many artists start off painting and their first three paintings are complete failures and they give it up. Painting is not for them. If I had done that I wouldn't be talking to you today. I wouldn't be making my living as a full-time artist. You have to go through buckets of paint and miles of canvas. The only thing that's going to shorten that time is to do the right things as soon as possible. You're still going to make mistakes but at least you're going to understand that this mistake is related to not doing this or not doing that. So a bit of knowledge is going to help you understand that this mistake was easily avoidable. Next time you're going to fix it and you're on your way. Don't rush the painting process. You can't jump from the composition into the highlights and final touches of the painting. You have to build it up layer by layer. So trying to achieve perfection is also related to this issue and it comes down to a fear. A fear of making a fool of yourself. A fear of making a mistake and wasting money and all of these sort of things. You've got to just put that all aside. There is no such thing as a perfect painting. Leonardo da Vinci discovered that when his Last Supper painting started falling off the walls. It was a mistake. Does that mean he's a bad painter? Of course not. Every artist is going to make mistakes because we are human and it's simply working at that little by little over time that you're going to become a great artist. The fifth mistake is overworking the painting. Knowing when to stop is not an easy thing to decide and I guess the biggest issue is have you created an effect of light in your painting? That's what I always ask myself. If I stand back and look at the painting, can I see the light at work? Do I know what the light is doing? And if so, the painting should be pretty much done. I might have to refine a few things, but as long as I've got an effect of light where somebody can look at it and say "okay I can see the light's coming from the right to the left. It looks like morning or maybe it's a sunset or maybe it's a very bright warm light or it's a cool light. If that can come across then you have done a great job. Trust me, very few people get that idea across in their paintings. So don't overwork it, just look for a light effect and overworking is where you repeat the brush strokes over let's say a particular spot and you just paint it over and over again and you blend away your paint and you add more paint and you blend that away and then you start muddying up the paint one layer over the other. It should be easy to layer wet paint over wet paint if it takes one stroke to put that layer down but if you go over it you're going to mix it all up. Does that make sense? Something you ought to practice and get familiar with. Have a look at the videos and see how the wet into wet process works, but taking less time is actually better than taking lots of time and overworking. Okay that's pretty much an overview of five typical but very important mistakes that need to be avoided and if you can work on these go through the the list and just go step by step and learn something perhaps once a week or over the weekend and you'll be doing a lot better a lot quicker. It's about identifying the problems and fixing them through a gradual process. If you want to keep receiving my painting videos please make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel. |
AuthorMalcolm Dewey: Artist. Country: South Africa Archives
January 2025
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