Imagine a time of poster paints and sugar paper. Of bright colours, chubbie crayons, green grass and blue skies. These were perfect painting days apart from one thing I almost forgot to mention….brown sludge.
Lots and lots of brown.
Your teachers told you ‘mix yellow and blue to make green’, red and blue to purple.
You listened, but the problem was still there.. you created brown sludge.
“All colours will agree in the dark.”
Francis Bacon
How to Mix Colour: The Basics
Learning how to mix colour can be daunting, colour theory can be off-putting, but understanding the basics is key when starting to paint.
A knowledge of colour theory is helpful, but in practice nothing beats actually mixing colours, however, you need to start somewhere so let’s start with some basic theory. I’ll be going into some advanced techniques in later posts.
How your hairdresser can teach you to mix paint colour
I’ll be honest, a few years ago I knew nothing about the hairdressing business until my wife opened her hair salon above my gallery, I can now tell you the difference between a champagne blonde and a beige blonde..(0.4 if you were wondering) but the main thing I hadn’t realized was the similarities between hair colourists and painters.
If you want to learn a fast track to understanding your paintings next time your at the salon have a chat to your hair colourist…
How to clean an Acrylic paintbrush with “The Masters” brush cleaner.
Video Transcript
Morning class, I’m Will Kemp from will kemp art school, and today I’m going to show you how to clean an acrylic brush properly.
So the first thing you need to do is get most of the paint off your brush to start with. It’s always easier to clean it off, just with kitchen roll, to wipe off most of the paint, then we can go into the water.
I use absolutely loads of kitchen roll when I’m working, and you just rub it into it.
You can scrub it quite hard, and often I squeeze the brush together into the kitchen roll…
An isolation coat is a coat between your finished painting and the varnish.
It is transparent and creates a physical separation between the varnish and your painting.
This is key because otherwise the varnish will stick to your painting and be a nightmare to try and remove. The varnish is not permanent, it just acts as a dust collector that you can remove and replace, every 5 to 10 years depending on how dusty the environment your painting is kept in.
To make an isolation coat I use GOLDEN Soft gel gloss. This medium is off the hook, and I highly recommend you buy it along with an Acrylic Glazing Liquid Gloss if you are starting acrylic painting. These bad boys are all you need.
Alternatively, Golden has recently released a pre-mixed isolation coat you can use.
A full-gloss finish can do amazing things to your paintings…
Gesso, pronounced ‘jesso‘, was traditionally used to prepare or prime a surface so Oil paint would adhere to it.
Gesso is the same as a primer, as in ‘pre-primed canvas’.
It is made from a combination of paint pigment, chalk and binder.
Traditional Oil ‘glue gesso’ was made with an animal glue binder, usually rabbit-skin glue, chalk, and white pigment, usually Titanium white.
Gesso is usually white or off-white and is used after you have sealed the raw canvas with a coat of size (see: the Trouble with Oil)
It creates a surface that is both absorbent (particularly useful for ‘dead’ colouring with oils) and has a ‘tooth’ (texture) that allows paint to grab onto the surface…
Understanding warm and cool colours can instantly give your paintings a sense of harmony.
In the above Titian painting ‘ Bacchus and Ariadne’ Titan has almost split the colour wheel in half in his composition. If you were to put a diagonal line straight through the painting, the cool tones of the blues, greens and purples would be dominant on the left and the warm tones of reds, oranges and yellows on the right.
If you squint your eyes at the picture, the general colour scheme is based on blue and orange, which are opposite each other in the colour wheel so are known as complementary colours…
“An artist’s career always begins tomorrow” James McNeill Whistler, Artist
Starting art is like starting a diet; you buy a new gym kit…your canvas
You sign up for the gym, … your new brushes
You sit down and have a cup of tea and slice of cake because it’s all been too much.
Sound familiar??
If you think you’re the only one struggling, think again…..
The number one mistake all beginners make is buying a pre-stretched canvas or canvas board from a discount bookstore and not unwrapping the cellophane from it.
The number two mistake is leaving the canvas white when they start painting.
The first technique I always teach in painting (and a technique I use on 99% of my work) is to cover the white canvas with one solid paint colour which is called a ‘ toned ground’.
This is short for ‘toned background’ and is No. 1 of my painting principles.
It can be called a ‘toned ground’ or ‘coloured ground’ as it can be used in drawing and painting.
Using a coloured ground does a number of fantastic things that are not to be underestimated when starting to learn how to paint.
It can transform your paintings by making them look more professional, increase the speed in creating your paintings and give you a fool-proof method of creating a tonal mood in your work…
It’s an exaggerated way of saying start with big brushes then end with a small one.
When starting painting, choosing brushes in this way can really help because it stops you focusing on the ‘interesting detail’.
Using large brushes to lay down bold and decisive strokes, helps to alleviate self-inflicted pressure to make the painting look finished too early on, in reality this never happens it’s like trying to re-landscape your garden without digging up the soil, you have to make the mess first to finish with the flowers.
How big is big?
If you use large brushes to begin your painting, you’ll develop brush handling skills, techniques and a huge variety of marks that can be achieved with one brush rather than relying on another specialist brush to fix the problem.
For example, if I was painting a 30 x 40cm canvas, I would start with a brush 2-4 cm wide.
What type of brush should I use?
One of the biggest stumbling blocks is indecision, if you only have one brush and two colours you’ve got no option, you just have to start.
I love filbert brushes, they are so flexible to use the hairs are quite long, arranged as a flat head and tapered to a rounded tip see: A quick way to understand brushes.
It’s always better to start with fewer brushes than to amass a whole drawer full and not start at all!
This may sound like the beginnings of a fairy-tale but it’s a quick and easy way to think about brushes. Most traditional brushes are made from animal hair and the quality of the brush – its bounce and feel, is dependent on the quality of the hair used.
Mink hair makes ‘Sable’ brushes and pig hair makes ‘Hog’ brushes…
“A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.”
Charles Dudley Warner
Getting your Absorbency Right
Your choice of what to paint on can alter the working properties of the paint and give you a different painting experience but it needn’t be a mystery if you follow a few simple rules.
1. Acrylics straight from the tube are the most flexible medium, so can be painted on anything – paper, canvas, cardboard, metal…literally anything.
2. Oils are more tricky, so have to be painted onto a properly prepared surface (see: The Trouble with Oil) I recommend a prepared canvas or prepared board.
3. Watercolours work best on paper, I recommend Cold Pressed paper (confusingly also referred to as NOT paper meaning ‘Not’ Hot Pressed). It’s ideal for less experienced painters as it’s more forgiving. (There is a huge range of Watercolour papers see: How to choose Watercolour Paper).
