steps for rub-out or subtractive method
Treatment of brushes
Mixing medium
Palette management
Mixing colors
Preparing the canvas
Paint consistency
Application of paint
Brushes:
New brushes: work the bristles between your fingers to loosen the starch a new brush has been treated with to keep its shape. But if you have time for your brushes to dry before use (especially soft hair brushes), wash them with soap and water, shape them to dry.
Before painting: put a small bit of linseed oil on your palette. Dip the brush you’ll be using into the oil to get a small amount on your brush. Massage oil into the bristles or hairs before picking up paint. Do this at the beginning of a painting session, only to brushes that you’re actually going to use. It will make it easier to clean your brushes later, keep them nice and silky and make them last a lot longer.
While painting: rather than constantly dipping brushes into solvents, try wiping your brush clean before changing colors. Or dip your brush into your medium, dab it a bit on the palette to loosen the paint, and wipe it clean. Solvent dulls your paint, so it’s not optimal to go back and forth between the brush cleaning can and your palette! It’s also not good for your health to release solvent fumes into the air. Save the can for the end of the session. Work the bristles or hairs gently against the coil, grid or whatever you’ve put in the bottom of your solvent can, use paper towel to absorb as much solvent as possible, then rub some Go-Jo or other waterless hand cleaner into the bristles or hair until it liquifies. Brushes may be washed with soap and water now or the next day--or if your brushes are mostly clean, you can wipe off the excess with a paper towel.
If you’re tired at the end of the session and not up to doing a good job of cleaning, wipe off excess paint, wrap brushes in a plastic bag (grocery bag is ok), twist around the handle and stow carefully--don’t bend the bristles--in the freezer. This will buy you a day, best not to push it much longer though.
Medium: 50% Liquin, 25% linseed oil, 25% odorless mineral spirits
I prefer students use Liquin because it dries faster than the other alkyd mediums.
Palette management: I recommend you arrange your paints along the upper edge of your glass palette, in order, beginning with white, yellow, orange, red, brown, green, blue, black--or any order that makes sense to you so long as you’re consistent. No need to re-invent the wheel every time you start a painting. A system frees your mind for higher priority tasks!
Use a palette knife for color mixing and wipe it with a paper towel to keep your color clean. I know--what a bother! I get out of the practice myself sometimes. After you’ve made a few color mixtures, move them to a side of the palette and use your widget to clean off the surface. Clean surface, clean color! Try to clean off your palette after a painting session--or before one. Make notes of color mixtures you especially like so you remember them.
Color mixing: Decide what color is most important to you in your painting and experiment with mixing it. Take a little time to get it right. A single color may be made many ways, so make a note in your sketchbook of the colors you used when you’ve got yours right. Make small mixtures when you’re experimenting, so you don’t waste paint. Once you have this “mother” color, experiment with dulling it with the colors opposite it on the color wheel. Darken and lighten this mother color. A bit of this color added to your other colors will create a logic and harmony throughout your painting. If you need a grey, use this color plus its color wheel opposite. Adjust it as you need to. Make your other colors in the painting with at least one of the colors that compose it.
You might try making up a sampling of the colors in your painting and see if they please you. Of course, you’ll probably adjust colors as you paint, but it’s good practice. Paints look different on horizontal surfaces than they do on the vertical canvas. They also are affected by the color of your imprimatura or by neighbor colors on the canvas. So it’s always necessary to try the mixture on the painting! It’s a good reason why we experiment with small batches of color before making a big puddle. (Putting a piece of colored paper or similarly colored scrap of canvas under the glass palette may make it easier to judge color mixtures.)
Preparing the canvas: Take a small amount of medium and mix it with a tiny bit of transparent paint and work it into the canvas with a big brush. Use the minimum necessary to moisten the surface. There should be a very slight sheen--if there’s more than this, blot off the excess.
Paint consistency: Paints vary in degree of oiliness straight from the tube so make your mixtures without medium at first. Add medium if your brush drags across the surface when you test it on the canvas. Most transparent colors will need little to no medium at this first stage. Once you begin adding white, a much stiffer paint, you will want to add medium in tiny amounts until the paint brushes freely.
Brush Strokes: Take some paint onto your brush by touching it to the edge of your pile of paint and draw it out a little. Load one side of the brush. You want to judge how big a stroke to make and load your brush accordingly. Sometimes it’s necessary to remove a little paint with your rag.
With your loaded brush, decide where the stroke will begin. Deliberately aim for that spot and deposit your paint there, pulling the stroke with decreasing pressure, and then lifting the brush from the canvas. With the paint that remains, you can apply paint to areas that don’t need such a large amount of paint. When you hold a brush almost parallel to the canvas, you will deposit more paint. When you hold the brush more nearly vertical, you’ll deposit less paint. Always pull your brush, don’t push--it will cause your bristles to splay and splinter. Likewise, don’t dash your bristles against the canvas, it will ruin the shape of your brush. If you’ve gotten into this bad habit and have brushes that resemble brooms, don’t despair: keep them for making imprimatura or maybe for random marks of grasses.
Note on Drying times: If you are using a Liquin-based medium your window for working the paint is 4 - 12 hours depending on the temperature in the studio. Cool weather slows drying. If you have painted thinly, allow paint to dry overnight before adding another layer. Allow several days if you want to glaze and if you have passages of thick paint. Test by touching the thick areas with your fingernail before glazing. Paint should be hard. The drying time may be speeded up by the use of alkyd white plus liquin.
Notes on Perspective: While the suggestion of 3-D space on a flat surface always intrigues us, we cannot SEE space. What we can do is learn the cues that artists have used for hundreds of years to make this magic happen on canvas.
Mixing medium
Palette management
Mixing colors
Preparing the canvas
Paint consistency
Application of paint
Brushes:
New brushes: work the bristles between your fingers to loosen the starch a new brush has been treated with to keep its shape. But if you have time for your brushes to dry before use (especially soft hair brushes), wash them with soap and water, shape them to dry.
Before painting: put a small bit of linseed oil on your palette. Dip the brush you’ll be using into the oil to get a small amount on your brush. Massage oil into the bristles or hairs before picking up paint. Do this at the beginning of a painting session, only to brushes that you’re actually going to use. It will make it easier to clean your brushes later, keep them nice and silky and make them last a lot longer.
While painting: rather than constantly dipping brushes into solvents, try wiping your brush clean before changing colors. Or dip your brush into your medium, dab it a bit on the palette to loosen the paint, and wipe it clean. Solvent dulls your paint, so it’s not optimal to go back and forth between the brush cleaning can and your palette! It’s also not good for your health to release solvent fumes into the air. Save the can for the end of the session. Work the bristles or hairs gently against the coil, grid or whatever you’ve put in the bottom of your solvent can, use paper towel to absorb as much solvent as possible, then rub some Go-Jo or other waterless hand cleaner into the bristles or hair until it liquifies. Brushes may be washed with soap and water now or the next day--or if your brushes are mostly clean, you can wipe off the excess with a paper towel.
If you’re tired at the end of the session and not up to doing a good job of cleaning, wipe off excess paint, wrap brushes in a plastic bag (grocery bag is ok), twist around the handle and stow carefully--don’t bend the bristles--in the freezer. This will buy you a day, best not to push it much longer though.
Medium: 50% Liquin, 25% linseed oil, 25% odorless mineral spirits
I prefer students use Liquin because it dries faster than the other alkyd mediums.
Palette management: I recommend you arrange your paints along the upper edge of your glass palette, in order, beginning with white, yellow, orange, red, brown, green, blue, black--or any order that makes sense to you so long as you’re consistent. No need to re-invent the wheel every time you start a painting. A system frees your mind for higher priority tasks!
Use a palette knife for color mixing and wipe it with a paper towel to keep your color clean. I know--what a bother! I get out of the practice myself sometimes. After you’ve made a few color mixtures, move them to a side of the palette and use your widget to clean off the surface. Clean surface, clean color! Try to clean off your palette after a painting session--or before one. Make notes of color mixtures you especially like so you remember them.
Color mixing: Decide what color is most important to you in your painting and experiment with mixing it. Take a little time to get it right. A single color may be made many ways, so make a note in your sketchbook of the colors you used when you’ve got yours right. Make small mixtures when you’re experimenting, so you don’t waste paint. Once you have this “mother” color, experiment with dulling it with the colors opposite it on the color wheel. Darken and lighten this mother color. A bit of this color added to your other colors will create a logic and harmony throughout your painting. If you need a grey, use this color plus its color wheel opposite. Adjust it as you need to. Make your other colors in the painting with at least one of the colors that compose it.
You might try making up a sampling of the colors in your painting and see if they please you. Of course, you’ll probably adjust colors as you paint, but it’s good practice. Paints look different on horizontal surfaces than they do on the vertical canvas. They also are affected by the color of your imprimatura or by neighbor colors on the canvas. So it’s always necessary to try the mixture on the painting! It’s a good reason why we experiment with small batches of color before making a big puddle. (Putting a piece of colored paper or similarly colored scrap of canvas under the glass palette may make it easier to judge color mixtures.)
Preparing the canvas: Take a small amount of medium and mix it with a tiny bit of transparent paint and work it into the canvas with a big brush. Use the minimum necessary to moisten the surface. There should be a very slight sheen--if there’s more than this, blot off the excess.
Paint consistency: Paints vary in degree of oiliness straight from the tube so make your mixtures without medium at first. Add medium if your brush drags across the surface when you test it on the canvas. Most transparent colors will need little to no medium at this first stage. Once you begin adding white, a much stiffer paint, you will want to add medium in tiny amounts until the paint brushes freely.
Brush Strokes: Take some paint onto your brush by touching it to the edge of your pile of paint and draw it out a little. Load one side of the brush. You want to judge how big a stroke to make and load your brush accordingly. Sometimes it’s necessary to remove a little paint with your rag.
With your loaded brush, decide where the stroke will begin. Deliberately aim for that spot and deposit your paint there, pulling the stroke with decreasing pressure, and then lifting the brush from the canvas. With the paint that remains, you can apply paint to areas that don’t need such a large amount of paint. When you hold a brush almost parallel to the canvas, you will deposit more paint. When you hold the brush more nearly vertical, you’ll deposit less paint. Always pull your brush, don’t push--it will cause your bristles to splay and splinter. Likewise, don’t dash your bristles against the canvas, it will ruin the shape of your brush. If you’ve gotten into this bad habit and have brushes that resemble brooms, don’t despair: keep them for making imprimatura or maybe for random marks of grasses.
Note on Drying times: If you are using a Liquin-based medium your window for working the paint is 4 - 12 hours depending on the temperature in the studio. Cool weather slows drying. If you have painted thinly, allow paint to dry overnight before adding another layer. Allow several days if you want to glaze and if you have passages of thick paint. Test by touching the thick areas with your fingernail before glazing. Paint should be hard. The drying time may be speeded up by the use of alkyd white plus liquin.
Notes on Perspective: While the suggestion of 3-D space on a flat surface always intrigues us, we cannot SEE space. What we can do is learn the cues that artists have used for hundreds of years to make this magic happen on canvas.
- Superimposure, or Overlapping: First on our list, near things hide more distant things.
- Light areas on a form advance, darker areas on the same form appear to recede.
- Specific vs. General: Detail advances, softer focus objects recede. Brighter colors advance, duller colors recede. Contast of dark and light brings objects forward, softer contrast recedes.
- Foreshortening: large advances, small recedes. Think of railroad tracks converging to infinity, or a line of fence posts that appear smaller as they are farther away.
- Lighting: highlights, half-tones and cast shadows all suggest an object occupying space.
- Associative cues: ellipses, or the forms of circles in space, placement of objects--things placed high on a page seem to recede while those placed low advance (ex. foreground objects.) Curving stripes on an animal give clues to its shape. copyright 2012, Susan Downing-White
