Painting

Painting - Key Concepts

• Understanding the basic principles: Sketching your basic layout, understanding the colour wheel and colour mixing, shading techniques, brush type usage, and understanding perspective are foundational knowhow for creating a painting.

• Different painting techniques: Familiarise yourself with varied techniques such as blending, scumbling, dry brushing, wet-on-wet, wet-on-dry, glazing, and stippling.

• Understanding mediums: Master the use of diverse mediums like acrylics, oils, watercolours, gouache and tempera. These mediums each have unique properties that can change the texture, saturation, and drying time of your work.

• Develop your style: This can be abstract, realistic, expressive, surrealistic, or any combination. Experimentation with different styles will help you develop your unique artistic voice.

• Conceptual Awareness: The ability to convey a certain feeling, idea, or narrative through your choice of subject, colour, and composition.

• Visual Elements: Knowledge of how to use line, shape, form, space, texture, value and colour is crucial. Visual element usage can dramatically impact the feeling and tone of your artwork.

• Painting’s art historical context: Understanding the significant periods of art history - such as Renaissance, Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Cubism - and the characteristics that define them, can help inspire your own art.

Painting - Skills and Techniques

• Use of materials and tools: How to prepare a canvas, choosing the right brushes, using a palette, and cleaning and storage of tools.

• Drawing and painting from life: Observational skills are vital. Practice by drawing or painting still lifes, landscapes, and people. This helps you to understand light, shade, and perspective.

• Painting Techniques: Mastery in techniques such as stippling, scrumbling, impasto, glazing, wash, wet-on-wet, gradation, etc.

• Understanding and using colour: Master how to mix colours to get the desired shade or tint. Understand colour theory and how to use it to your advantage, e.g., cool vs warm colours and complementary colours.

Critical and Analytical Skills In Painting

• Art criticism: The ability to evaluate your own work and the work of others objectively.

• Art vocabulary: Understanding and using appropriate terms to describe techniques, elements, and principles of art.

• Art appreciation: Being able to appreciate the work of other artists, to understand their style, to analyse their techniques and skills, and to absorb inspiration from them.

Remember, experimental and imaginative thinking is valued in art. Your creative journey should be one of discovery and fearless exploration of different styles, techniques, and mediums.