SPRING 2013 ACRYLIC CLASS

Project:Az Wash

This past week in class we did a couple of techniques to our study then we started our project. The techniques we learned were how to do a wet and a dry glaze. Both are very handy to know and can be used in a wide variety of situation.

The dry brush glaze is great when you need to work in smaller areas or add areas of haze or mist. It is great for fog, smoke, dust anything that might be in the air that is soft and hazy, even clouds are made with this technique. The key is a brush that is just damp – you shouldn’t be able to squeeze any water from it - and very little paint.

After you rinse your brush squeeze it in your paper towel until it is mostly dry. The bristles will be damp but there should be no excess water in the brush. When you load your brush with paint, work the color into the bristles then wipe the excess off on your paper towel, the color should be mostly in the bristles not on the bristles (no visible lumps). To apply the color (whatever color you are using depending on your subject), using the small side of your flat bristle brush, with very light pressure on the brush, go in small circles, you should be able to see the color that is underneath this glaze, if you press too hard or go over and over the same area, you will lose the under color, if that is what you want to do fine but it is better to sneak up on it and stand back often to see if you are getting the desired effect. Also, if you rub in one place too long you run the risk of rubbing a hole in the paint, so a light touch and keep moving.

The other form a glazing is a wet glaze. This is a technique that you use over a larger, broader area usually. It can instantly add distance to you painting by adding a visual atmosphere to the areas you apply it to, you can also use a variation of this technique to add a shimmer to still water again, it is a good thing to know and practice.

You usually will need your wide blending or hake brush for this technique because you will want to cover the area quickly and evenly this brush works great for doing just that sort of thing. The color may vary depending on what you are trying to accomplish but it usually includes a bit of gesso (gesso as oppose to regular white because it is on the opaque side which you will need in most cases) and some color. If you want it warm you use the warm colors of the palette (I’m talking visual heat such as reds, yellows and oranges) or if you want to cool it down use the cool side of the palette (blues, purples, some greens) this color is totally dependent on what you need it to do. To this color you will add A LOT OF WATER. I don’t usually tell you to add a ton of water on the contrary I tell you to be careful not to add too much water to your paint but for this technique to work correctly the color needs to be thinned down so that when you apply it, it is more a haze of color so you can see what is underneath. Keep this in mind though when you are loading your brush, you don’t want it to be dripping off your brush so soak up any excess with your paper towel and if you get runs on your canvas, quickly clean them off with a wet paper towel and smooth out the color in the area so it looks evenly applied. This will be kinda scary because when it is wet it looks very thick but as it dries it will be just a haze of color if you did it correctly, which is why we practice.

You can also use this technique to tint all or part of your painting. I sometimes will want to warm the entire painting up and will use a very diluted color (quinacridone gold) and go over my entire painting with this color (no gesso). You can also “antique” a painting with umber same thing and lightly wiping. Please practice this before you try it on your “masterpiece” so you know just how much you need to do.

 

Start of the Az Wash project

This is where we started the actual project, since I have already gone over those techniques I’m not going to type them out again, just go back to the earlier posts for the sky and the mountains, the same things applies to the actual project so use the posts as a review. See you in class.

SPRING 2013 ACRYLIC CLASS – More Practice

Picture Page - https://plus.google.com/photos/110300529433736983967/albums/5859327791094922657?banner=pwa

 

Creating distance in the landscape.

We are finishing up some of our practice studies for now but don’t leave your spare canvas at home it will be used again when we get into other areas of the project and it is always good to have when you need to test a color or to practice a brush stroke so it is handy to keep close. We have really only covered the background of our project and there is still a glazing I want to do on this before we start the project so be sure to bring your study to class.

I started with the highlights on the cliffs and while it is a brighter value than the shadows around it, the highlights are still slightly gray because they are in the distance. You don’t want to make them bright white or any bright color because it just wouldn’t look right. I still have the gray I mixed (Ultra marine blue, burnt sienna and white) on my palette so I added a touch of that gray to white (gesso) along with a touch of orange, it should look like a soft, warm gray color. I used my #4 flat bristle brush but you can use a #4 flat sable if you have one, the key to both brushes is very little paint, this will be a dry brush technique regardless of which brush you use. Mix enough paint so you don’t have to remix we will be adding to this color for other highlights.

Load your brush so that you have paint in the bristles, then lightly wipe off the excess from the outside. I turned my brush so the flat edge was vertical to my canvas to highlight the vertical rocks at the tops of the cliffs. Like everything else in painting, this takes practice, observation and trust. Practice because you need to get the right amount of paint and pressure on your brush; observation so you look at your reference before you start painting so you see exactly what you are painting and why, and trust that what I am instructing you to do is for your best interest.

The trust part is especially true so that practice and observation make sense. You need to trust that when I tell you that the quicker you do these strokes the better. They are just shapes. The more pressure you put on your brush the more paint come off and the area will look brighter, the lighter the pressure, the less paint comes off and more of the under painting comes through so the same color can look darker in value because it is visually mixing with the color underneath.

Shear rock cliffs give way to hills.

Observe in the reference photo (ALWAYS have your reference material out when you are painting) that the brightest area is on the right hand side of that rounded cliff. These are shear rock faces reflecting light, other areas are more subtle probably because they are made up or broken rocks. Also notice that the rock faces only come down so far before they change in to softer mounds or eroded rocks/dirt that have piled up at their bases. Where these two areas meet is where your brush strokes go from a vertical stroke to a more diagonal stroke. You want your brush to follow the shape of the thing you are painting. When it changes from solid rock to softer hill side the color also becomes softer and not as bright so less pressure more dry brush.

That rock face on the rounded cliffs is the brightest highlight on the ridge, the other highlights are done the same way with the same brush but I added a touch more orange and gray to my highlight color. There also some detail in the shadowed sides of the cliffs that are done in exactly the same way but with shadow colors. You can leave the original under painting as your brightest areas in your shadows and mix a color that is slightly darker than the under painting. Remember that this cliff is in the distance you will not see any really dark colors so this shadow color should still be a medium dark, blue gray. This color becomes the shadows and cracks between the rocks. Look at the reference photo to see where this color goes, it is done just like the highlights, very dry brush but now instead of painting the bright areas (positive painting) you are painting the shadows (negative painting).

 

You can always go back an improve your sky.

Several people in class asked about the sky. Some were not happy with it some just wanted to give it more clouds I showed how to change your sky by adding to what I had and not painting it out. I added some of that dark blue gray I used as my shadow color from the cliffs and using the same #4 bristle brush on its little side and making a circular, dry brush stroke I added some darker clouds to my left corner. While it was still wet I took some of my lighter gray color and added that into the darker gray to soften the edges and again with white this time softened the edges eve more blending wet into wet. I added some whiter clouds with what I had on my brush and just a touch or white along the tops. This added more drama to my sky and it was another good thing to practice.

The last thing we practiced was the tree line on the other side of the wash. Once again – and I will be saying this often – look at your reference photo. The trees on the other side of the wash form a pretty solid looking barrier from a distance but it is not a wall or a hedge. No one has come out and pruned those trees so they are one perfectly manicured, same height mass of trees, these trees are only pruned by Nature so they can be ripped out by the roots in a flood or have branches blown off in a wind, their height and spacing will vary greatly, when you sketch in your tree line, keep this in mind. There should be a lot of ups and downs, ins and outs as you sketch. There should be gaps, tall trees, short trees, missing trees just no hedge trees.

 

The highlights on the trees are subtle the  shadows
are a blue gray, not black.

Even those these trees are closer to us, there is still distance between the foreground and the trees across the wash, the color we will be using is going to be green but it is going to be a very gray green in color. If you need to mix more gray see the formula above (burn this in your brain) because we will be using this color as our base. To that gray color add sap green, a touch more blue and a touch of purple. You should have a dark khaki or military green color, this will be the base color for your trees.

I switched to a #10 bristle brush to cover the area quickly but keep your smaller brush handy. Just like I did when forming the mountain ridge, though this time I used my brush more vertically to create smaller shapes, starting near my sketch line, I pulled down to form the tops of my trees. You can scumble and scrub the color into the trees once you are away from the top shape of the trees to get the area covered as quickly as possible. While it isn’t necessary, if you want you can add a touch of orange and a little touch of white to make a highlight color this color should be more orange than white, most of you were using either white exclusively or predominately and the highlights looked too chalky, use your smaller brush and while the under painting is still wet, you can suggest highlights in your trees on the right hand side. Smudge with your finger so you don’t have hard lines. You can do this when it is dry but I like the wet into wet look. You can also add shadows the same way either wet into wet or dry brush but instead of lighter colors add more blue and purple to your base green to make shadows under the trees in between trees and limbs (look at your reference photo or go look at trees).

I want to show you how to glaze this before we start the project so bring your study to class and a blank canvas to start the project. PLEASE do not do any drawing or sketching, we will do that as we go and as needed. I will see you in class, be ready to get to work.

SPRING 2013 ACRYLIC – Practice

 (Class Picture Page Link)

A bit of background so you can understand the process: When I am looking through my photos looking for something I think we can paint as a class project I am looking for something that is not only interesting but also doable in both acrylics and watercolor as class projects. The photo I chose for this semester’s class project was one that really interested me but I had to see if I could break it down enough so it wouldn’t intimidate my students too much. I want to present you with challenges, not brick walls so I did a couple of studies you may have seen in class.

 

Reference Photo

As I was doing the studies – one in acrylic and the other in watercolor – I saw that while it really wasn’t hard to do in either medium there were some areas that might cause some problems for students because they look complicated if you don’t know what you are doing, however, with a little practice I think we can muddle through and learn a lot in the process. So with that in mind I decided that for returning students it would be good review and for new students it would give them some practice with their equipment and paints if we did some practice studies the first couple of week. Once you have done it, it takes away the fear and I know most will not practice this on their own.

Since we always work from the furthest to the closest I thought we would start with the sky. This sky on the day I took the photo was after a rain so there were broken clouds that were white to almost charcoal with patches of blue shining through. The first thing I had students do was to mix up some gray. My standard gray – this should be committed to memory BTW – is ultramarine blue, burnt sienna (this makes a very dark color), white or gesso to change the value to a medium gray and sometimes just a tiny touch of purple but not so much that the color looks purple, the purple goes a long way so when I say tiny, I mean tiny. The color you end up with should be a nice medium value, cool gray. Mix enough because we will be using it in the next step as well.

I was using my #10 flat bristle brush to do this step and it will work better for you than a round brush of similar size.

Acrylic Sky (see Picture page for bigger image)

With my bristle brush and gesso, I coated an area where I will paint the sky and a little more. While you don’t have to paint the whole canvas with sky, you also don’t want to paint just the sky’s area because you want to be sure that when you put something, such as out mountains, in front of it, you want to be sure that your sky covers enough of your canvas that you won’t leave blank canvas showing when you paint your mountains in. I actually did that in class so we all are prone to not covering enough area for our sky. It can also look “cut and paste” because of canvas showing or hard lines between the two areas.

While the gesso is still wet, I streaked in some blue areas along with some gray areas and leaving some of the gesso for white cloud areas, to suggest clouds with breaks in them – same brush – then I rinsed my brush and wiped it out, then using a kinda flat “X” stroke with very little pressure. I lightly blended the areas together. I mean lightly. If you use too much pressure it will be too streaky and you will drag too much of the colors into each other and loose the distinction between them until all you have is a streaky gray color. You can pick up more of a color and add it back into an area, again using a light pressure on your brush.

This takes practice and patience learning how to hold your brush (it isn’t a pencil or pen), how to mix color, how to get the consistency right (your paint should be like soft butter)…So many things to think of all at once, doing these little practice studies are very important in your learning process so don’t overlook them. This was only one way to make a sky and it will be a more “painterly” sky than other techniques but I think it will work with this project.

 

Mountains based in.

The next thing we did was learn how to paint in our mountains. Keep in mind that as things go off into the distance they become softer, lighter and grayer in color and less detailed. Mountains that are 100 miles away won’t have much detail if any. You might see snow or where the sun is hitting them but that is about it, further away you won’t even see that much. As things come closer they become darker in value until you start to see some color of rocks and/or trees even closer you might see tops of trees or rock outcroppings and still on the grayish side but that is about as much detail you will see until they are right in front of you.

With that in mind, these mountains are about 10 – 15 miles from where I took the photo so you can see a little detail but the color is very blue gray, which is where your gray mix comes in to play again, if you have run out, mix up some more, it doesn’t have to be a perfect match as long as it is gray. I was still using my #10 flat bristle brush loading it with my gray and working it into the bristles, on my canvas I used my charcoal to sketch the outline of the top edge of the

Note the soft top edge made with the flat end of the bristle brush.

mountains then with the flat edge of my brush on that charcoal line I pulled down to form the top edge of the mountains. Because acrylics dry so fast you don’t usually want to outline with your brush or you can leave a hard line the reason I use the end of my brush and pull down to form the edge. In the body of the mountain it is just a matter of filling it in just keep in mind it is not a wall. Do not use long flat strokes, they can and will show in the final painting, instead use what is called a scumbling stroke which basically means your brush goes in all directions and you can scrub the color in as well. Be sure you bring the color down far enough to be behind any trees and that the bottom edge is soft, no hard line.

Next week we will practice adding some detail to the mountains, adding some foreground trees and doing a wash to push the whole thing back. If there is time we may practice with the liner brush or we may wait to do that when we get closer to that part of the project. Keep your practice board handy, you may need to use it as you go along.

I also want to remind/encourage my returning students to consider being a part of the Torrance cable project that Hope presented in class last week, it could help encourage other people who have retired or are thinking of retiring and wondering what they are going to do with their life to get out and try something they may have thought they were too old to do. I think my mom would have been up to it if she were still alive, she was learning new things almost to the day she died and she was 94, so not only would you be doing a good deed encouraging other seniors, you can show your friends and family what you do. Think about it. See you in class.

ACRYLIC CLASS SPRING 2013

Project: Desert Wash Walk

Here is the link to the Picture page for this semester.
https://plus.google.com/photos/110300529433736983967/albums/5859327791094922657?banner=pwa

Feel free to download both the reference photo and the drawing to be used in class. Let me know if you have problems with the link, Google has been messing with things again now there are two places I have to tell it to share, at least the 2 that I could find.

See you in class.

WINTER 2013 ACRYLIC CLASS

Project:Clay Pots and Chilies

After having a week’s break, it was nice to come back and get working on our project again. The break did allow me to take a really good look at my painting and I noticed that there were a couple of things I wanted to change, one was one of the handles on the short jug, I didn’t feel it was in the right place in relationship to the other handles on the jug. The other was I wanted to put just a bit of light  right behind the tall vase, kind of adds to the “spot light” effect I am going for and puts a bit of a lighter color behind the jug’s dark side as well.

First the moving of the handle: This will happen to you upon occasion so it is a good lesson to show you that all is not lost if you need to change something in your painting that has already dried but you really don’t like something about it such as placement. I used my #8 bristle brush and to apply Hooker’s green, ultramarine blue and touches of sienna and purple to paint out the handle. The key to making it look like it never happened in the first place is to blend the new colors into the existing area and make it a big enough area so it doesn’t look like a solid spot. The handle was on the side and you could see thru the handle, I wanted to move it back so you just see the top part of it so I carefully painted out the handle with my mix of color and scrubbed the color up past the top of the jug and almost down to the bottom, I also blended out from the jug since I was going to deepen the color anyway I just continued to use those colors to deepen the wall on up to the corner and along the top to the chilies.

Almost done. Few more details and highlights
should finish this up.

This is where learning how to change the pressure on your brush will aid you, if you need more paint to come off your brush you press harder, if you want to blend into another color use less pressure. I used this same dry brush technique to add more light around the tall vase and blended the two areas together using less pressure on my brush. Practice this technique on a scrap canvas so you know how it works.

Once I painting out the handle and I was satisfied with the results, when the area had dried I under painted the handle where I wanted it and no one will be the wiser. This is important to know and to practice because we all will find the need from time to time and it shouldn’t be a big deal.

I also deepened the shadows on the ground, again using the dry brush technique, using the same brush with sienna, purple and blue, occasional touch of red and long flat overlapping “u” strokes.

Here is another example of fixing something you don’t really like: I had added more highlights to the ground and as I stood back and looked at it, it just seemed too bright and too big an area around the main features, it pulled the eye away from the pots and chilies and was this big light spot on the ground so I did two things. First, I mixed up a glaze of sienna, touch of orange and white with a lot of water and went over the light spot on the ground, then I went back to the shadow color or the ground and brought the side of it in closer to the pots and reshaped it so it wasn’t so round, I like it a lot better.

To the pots and chilies I just did more highlighting. Please keep in mind that the highlights on the pots are not white but a light version of the pots and very fuzzy at their edges because of the texture of the pots. I was still using my bristle brush for this because I was doing a lot of scrubbing and I don’t want to ruin my good sable brushes with a lot of scrubbing.

However, when I was working on the chilies adding more highlights or basing in the ones on the table, I did use my #4 flat sable brush along with red and orange for the highlights and crimson and blue to under paint the chilies on the table. One of the reasons I use pure red or red with orange or yellow or orange to highlight the red chilies, if you add white to red, even in small doses, you will get pink and that may not be the color you want for your red hot chilies, so use the other light colors like the yellow and/or orange for the highlights an you r reds will stay looking red.

I am hoping to finish my painting up next class but if you are still working on the project, I will be bringing the set up in as long as you need it or the end of the semester, whichever comes first. Be thinking about what you would like to paint next, I am open to suggestions.

WINTER 2013 ACRYLIC CLASS

Project: Clay Pots and Chilies

I hope that you are all up to the point where you are done with the under painting because now we are going to start the highlighting process and everything needs to be under painted.

One of the biggest problems when we are doing a still life in class is being able to get proper lighting on the subject. There is a lot of ambient light in the room from several sources such as the overhead lights and the windows and all this “excess” light can confuse your actual light source which is the light I put on the subject. As an artist one of the things you need to practice is picturing in your mind where the light is coming from and how it is landing on your subjects, this skill can come in very handy when you don’t like a light source and want to change it, or there is more than one light source creating a flat lighting situation, if you do any plein air you will need to be able to remember the early morning or the late afternoon light you want or maybe it is over cast with no clear shadows… There are many situations where you can use the ability to “see” how the light hits an object and where shadows fall to make your painting more interesting and more dramatic.

My light is coming from the upper right.

I do this almost as a second nature because I love the drama one can get with the play of light and shadow, I know it can be confusing to my students who are watching me paint because they don’t see what I’m seeing in my mind’s eye, but because I do practice this skill all the time and I observe how light will fall under all conditions in the natural world, I can be fairly certain that the way I am painting the light is as close to seeing the real thing as I can get.

That said, I am assuming that I only have one light source (we only have one sun, so that is logical) and it is coming from the upper right hand side at about the 2 o’clock position, all other light I see on the real still life is not of consequence and I will ignore it. This means that as the light falls on my subject the brightest areas will be on the right side on the outside of the pots and chilies. I make that distinction because the light will hit on the left inside of the two vases/jugs, shadow will be on the left sides and fall towards the left.

More light on the chilies
and a reflected highlight
on the vase.

I mixed a beginning highlight color for the two vases with a base of burnt sienna, with touches of orange, yellow, white and even a bit of red on occasion. The taller of the two is a bit more on the orange side than the other which tends to be a bit redder so I adjusted my color accordingly. I was using a flat sable brush but you can use a flat bristle as well, I just have more control over the sable brush and I won’t be doing any scrubbing so the sable is perfect. Starting on the right hand side, following the contours of the vase (remember it is a rounded, curved surface), I pulled the color in and working across the vase and lightening the pressure on my brush as I got to my shadow areas to blend the highlight into the shadow. Your under painting in many areas will become the shadowed area so do not paint it out. THIS IS NOT MY FINAL HIGHLIGHT this is just the beginning of the highlighting process to create the shape and form of my pots. I was very aware of where the light was falling on the pots so I was sure to paint around the shadows.

The bowl was a bit different because it has some smoky color as well as the sienna color. To get that grey color I mixed my sienna with my blue and a touch of white just to lighten it slightly. Whine I was painting the inside of the bowl, I would pick up some straight burnt sienna and loosely blend the colors together so you could still see streaks of the sienna, looked almost exactly the same as the actual bowl when I was done. The outside was done the same way but I didn’t add any white to the sienna and blue mix so it stayed dark.

The rim of all the pots was a lighter version of the sienna and orange with a bit of the dark color to grey it a bit and white to lighten it. Still using a flat sable brush I put this color on the rims then with my finger, softened the edges because the edges are slightly rounded into the pots and the bowl.

Close-up of the ground. Note that the under painting shows through.

Going back to my #10 bristle brush, and mixing into that light rim color I was just using, I mix a bit more sienna into it and a bit of yellow and white (gesso) to get a soft peach color, using the long, flat strokes and the dry brush technique (very little paint or water on the brush) I dry brushed in another layer of light into the ground the pots are sitting on. Again, I am not trying to cover up everything I did before, just add a few more highlights to the ground, there will probably be at least one more round of highlights on the ground because acrylics always dry a bit darker and I want this to look like sun shine.

Lastly, I under painted the chilies in the bowl with alizarin and blue to make a very deep red color basing it in with my sable brush. I made sure that the edges were very random so it looked like chilies in there and not Jello.

Please try to get you painting up to this point when class resumes. We should have maybe one or two more sessions for the class project so you will want to be looking for your own project when you are finished with this one.

Picture page link -   https://picasaweb.google.com/110300529433736983967/Winter2013ArtClsses

WINTER 2013 – ACRYLIC CLASS

Project: Clay Pots and Chilies

I want to reassure the newer students in class that there is method to my madness. I heard comments to the effect that “It’s very dark!” Yes it is! And that is a good thing. In any painting you need to have dark to show light so with most mediums – with a couple of exceptions like watercolor – your under painting tends to be on the dark side for the first couple layers, this is true in oils and also pastels. You have to have that darkness so when you put lighter colors on it they will show up. Don’t panic, we will start to put the light into it next week.

That said, I finished under painting my bowl. I want you to notice that aside from the string of chilies, I have not painted the chilies in the bowl or on the table, also notice that on the inside of the bowl I painted it as if there were no chilies in there at all. I did not paint around the area of the chilies because I do not know where those chilies will be when I do put them in but I know the back of the bowl will need to be there when I get around to it.

When I painted the bowl, I needed it to be a different color, this bowl was probably closer to the fire where the smoke was (called a reduction fire) which added blackened streaks to the bowl and a grayer color to the natural clay. Burnt sienna is still my base but to it I added ultramarine blue, a touch of purple and a tiny amount of white. It should be a warm (color-wise) charcoal gray. (If you don’t understand color “temperature” here is an abridged version: visual warm colors are red, orange, yellow and all their variations such as brown [orange family], magenta [red family] ocher [yellow family]. The cool colors are purple, blue and green and all their variations such as lavender [purple], turquoise [blue], khaki [green]). If the color is too cool – to the blue side – add a touch more sienna.

Everything is now under painted.

Using my #4 flat SABLE brush (a sable will give you more control, just don’t scrub with it) and following the curves of the bowl, if you don’t have a flat sable use a flat bristle, it’s just not as springy as a sable. I filled in the inside of my bowl with the color I mixed. Down toward the bottom, inside of the bowl where the light will be blocked I kept it very dark, as I painted up into the area where light will fall, I added touches of white and orange or sienna to SLIGHTLY lighten the area, I am not up to the lightest lights yet but I can start the process. On the outside I used the same dark mixture I used on the inside of the bowl, same brush but I streaked it on following the curve of the bowl and picking up straight burnt sienna with the mud on my brush to add the streaks of natural clay color you see in the bowl.

Once I had the bowl under painted, I now had all of my elements under painted so I could proceed on to the first phase of bringing in the light. I started with the peppers, using the same sable brush and alizarin crimson. If you don’t have alizarin add a touch of your ultramarine blue to the napthol red to cool it down it should be a value or two lighter than what is there. Again, this is just under painting for the chilies but we will be a bit more specific, yet, the chilies are just shapes, the quicker you get them in the better they look. If you try to nitpick each individual chili, your chilies will look over worked and won’t fit in with the rest of the painting. You might want to practice before you do it on your painting, however, if you twist your brush in your fingers and lift as you make your shapes, you will get a more natural looking chili then trying to be too specific.

The chilies go in all directions, they are twisted, curled, turn up and down or both, they overlap each other, some come at you some point away, just be free with shapes  and be sure to get them down behind the  vase in front of them. The chilies near the bottom will be in shadow so add a touch of blue and/or purple but keep it just slightly lighter than your first layer of paint. When you are satisfied with that layer of alizarin, this time pick up either your napthol red or your cad red and do the same thing but keep this color more where the light might hit it, you can also pick up touches or orange to paint either new chilies or to highlight existing chilies. DO NOT COVER UP ALL THAT ORIGINAL DARK AREA that becomes the shadows on the inside of the chili string.

The last thing I did in class is to start the highlighting of the ground around my bowls. I am going to have my bowls sitting in the dirt, if you are doing something different and need help figuring it out, catch me in class and I will help you achieve the desired effect.

Back to my #10 flat bristle brush, I mixed burnt sienna with a touch of white and maybe a little orange for the area where light will be hitting, I will be adding color to my brush as I go but this will be what I start with. When I load my brush I wipe out any excess either on my palette or on my paper towel so I’m not dealing with a glob of paint, then with the flat end of the brush slightly on its side but entirely on the surface of the canvas I make a long, flat “u” stroke. The harder you push on your brush, the more paint will come off it, conversely, the lighter the pressure the less paint comes off so adjust the pressure of your brush to your needs.

I added the light color in over lapping strokes but still leaving some of the under painting show through, this gives texture and depth to the ground, that said, by using varying pressure on my brush, I did congest the area so it didn’t look like a Flat U convention. When I got to the corners and to areas where I wanted shadow, the stroke was the same but to my brush I added more straight sienna, along with blue, purple and a touch of red here and there and mixed the colors on the canvas and blended them into the lighter areas. This is only step one for highlighting the dirt but it is an important step.

We will continue the highlighting process next week, if you have questions specific to your painting please let me know, someone else might be having the same problem. You are all doing great, I hope you are having fun, I know I’m liking this painting. See you in class.