A brief overview of Artists’ vs Student quality paint
There are usually two grades of colour available, artist quality and student quality.
But what is the difference?
And, is it worth the cost?
When first starting painting lessons it is often overwhelming to try and decide which brush to buy, what canvas to paint on and the biggest choice of all. What paints to buy!
Your paints can help greatly in your progress as a painter, what usually happens is a hesitancy on investing in the ‘good quality’ paints until you yourself become a better painter.
This is a mistake.
One of the key things to understand is the labelling and differences between artist and student quality paint and how better quality paint, can make your life as a painter much easier…
This technique is best for landscapes and still life paintings. Video transcript:
When I’m doing (painting) landscapes, or still life’s, I usually always use Yellow Ochre as a coloured ground.
It has got a nice mid-tone to it, a really lovely warmth to it. It’s cheap and if you move onto Oil painting it dries quickly…
Vincent Van Gogh, Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, 1888.
Complementary colours
Two colours, placed side by side, will appear differently depending on which colours are used and what they are placed next to.
The effect of this interaction is called simultaneous contrast.
Simultaneous contrast is most intense when two complementary colours are juxtaposed directly next to each other.
For example, red placed directly next to a green, if you concentrate on the edge you will see a slight vibration.
Your eye doesn’t like resting on the edge. The two complementary colour in their purest, most saturated form don’t sit well together, however, if you want to try and focus your viewer gaze on a particular part of the painting a knowledge of the ‘attraction to the eye’ can be used to great effect…
“I am a simple man, and I use simple materials: Ivory black, Vermilion (red), Prussian blue, Yellow ochre, Flake white and no medium. That’s all I’ve ever used in my paintings.
L.S.Lowry
A great deal of things in nature are actually very muted, it is often the difference between light and dark and warm and cool colours, rather than the use of a bright colour.
If you want to paint subtle still life paintings, choose muted earth colours.
If you want very bright, vivid abstracts, you might need some more man-made pigments that have a higher colour saturation.
My suggested basic acrylic colour palette is somewhere in-between. It allows bright colour mixtures as well as subtle. The pigments are all light-fast (will not fade over time) and are a mixture of series (the price labelling system of paints) so the cost will be kept down….
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…..
