• Our monthly YouTube chat will be held on October 23 rather than the 16th. Enjoy this refurbished encore post from March, 2019! In an interview some time back, I was asked, "What's your criticism of most painting teachers?" That one took me aback for a moment, then I heard myself say, "They don't teach students how to practice." Think about it: The best musicians spend hours behind closed doors, practicing finger exercises, arpeggios, going over selected portions of a piece of music - all sorts of maneuvers that they were taught by THEIR teachers for honing their craft. Professional golfers go through routine practice exercises daily to keep what they've obtained already and to find ways to make their game even better. Many of these behind the scene routines were shown them by their teachers. Go through the list, whether in the arts or sports or any other performance field: the pros will always tell you that the behind the scenes daily practice is paramount to their success. So why not for painters? Well, for the masters, it is. FOR THE PAINTER, TWO OF HUNDREDSThere are dozens of ways to practice that can make the best painter a better painter and enable the emerging painter to thrive. Here are just two: Fruit and veggies are great subjects for this one. Bell peppers are ideal because the come in several colors. Place the reference under a single direct light, then one at a time, observe how the colors/values change in different
parts of what's in shadow and what's not in shadow. Find the color mixtures that will give you those variations. Dozens and dozens of these will feed your skills like nothing else. As you discover these colors, make mixes of them with color charts and quick color studies of the image in which you found those colors. Find some piece of nature - bark, a rock, sand, leaf, etc - and discover by experimenting from your tube colors, two cools and two warms with white that will give you the variations you are seeing in that reference. Make color
splotches of your discoveries, then do a small study of the object. The advantage of the painter is that we can keep a record of our practices. Invest in hardbound sketchbooks for doing your studies. These hold up beautifully and give you a progressive record of your work. In them do some kind of practice work every day--quick drawings of whatever you see around you, rough watercolor studies of places you go, notes of whatever comes to mind while you are practicing. Betsy
Wyeth, Andrew's wife, retrieved from the floor hundreds of his drawings and studies. These were his practices that served their purpose, then were no longer important to him. It was the experience he needed to create the painting he wanted. Could it be that all those practice pieces largely the reason he reached the heights he did in painting? I wouldn't be
surprised! Enjoy a fun weekend practicing! During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
You can access the archive of all my newsletters (as well as the Quick Tips and other stuff) at any time by going HERE.
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