Posts Tagged ‘Oil Paintings’
Painting at Pemberton Park
For a while, I have been thinking of going to Pemberton Park and doing a large landscape painting of Turtle Island. I have already painted it 3 times. First, I did a realistic painting, and with the help of a wonderful teacher, it looks great and hangs above my mantle. The second and third times, I outlined the important parts and painted them in a solid color, so those paintings look rather like stained glass windows.
Today I started by outlining (lightly) the main parts of the painting, but adding texture with lights and darks and a variety of colors. And this time, I had lots of company as a group of first graders and their teachers and helpers were having a field trip and all stopped by to chat with me. What a fun time I had talking with those delightful children and their chaperones!
Choosing a Scene for your Landscape Painting
We are all attracted to some scenes more than others. So the first task is to find a scene that speaks to you. As you think about the placement of that scene on your canvas, think of a Tic-Tac-Toe grid. Where the vertical lines cross the horizontal lines are the “sweet spots”. The focus of your landscape painting should be in one of those 4 areas.
Using a view finder or making a square or rectangle with your hands (depending on the shape of your canvas) will help in deciding just what to draw on your canvas. Making a few sketches in your sketch book will help you in deciding exactly how you want to place your landscape painting on the canvas, what to include and what to omit. These sketches also help you to remember just where you were when you painted that scene..
Colors to use for Landscape Paintings
If you are a beginner, chances are that you may need to buy paint. Inexpensive paint will work just fine as all paint consists of pigment and a binder, often linseed oil. I suggest small tubes of warm and cool varieties of the three major colors plus raw umber and white. For example, alizarin crimson and cadmium red light, cadmium yellow hue and cad yellow pale hue (cadmium is a heavy metal and is toxic, therefore always use the hue, if possible), ultramarine blue and cerulean blue.
Titanium white is probably the best white for all around use and you will probably need a large tube, but bear in mind that titanium is also toxic, so if some gets on your skin, try to wash it off as soon as possible. Personally, I use Flake White Replacement, as it is non toxic, but more difficult to find.
Also, consider the medium you might want to use to dilute the colors and/or help them to flow. In the past, I used turpentine to help the colors flow, as well as to wash my brush. However, turp is also toxic. Now, I use linseed oil for both purposes. Ordinary canola oil is good for cleaning the brushes followed by washing with ordinary hand soap or Master’s Soap, which is wonderful for getting out even dried paint.
With these few colors, you will be able to mix any color you choose in preparation for your landscape paintings.
Mixing Colors for Oil Paintings
In order for us to see anything, there must be light. Light from the sun contains all the colors, as demonstrated when the sun light shines through a prism and is broken into all the colors of the rainbow.
When the sun shines on a red apple, we see that the apple is red because the skin of the apple absorbs the remaining colors. Likewise, a green apple reflects the green light and absorbs the others.
Paints that we use in oil paintings are especially dense in pigments. When we mix them, we are mixing “color”. We are working with the pigments that reflect the colors we want to see (and absorbing all the rest), and combining these colors to form the other colors we want to see.
Shape, Value and Edge
If you stop to think about it for a minute, you will realize that when you look at anything, three parts are involved: shape, value, and edges. You will probably recognize the shape at once. Is it a pear, a box, or a silo (or, whatever)? The value is the color you would see if the image were reproduced in black and white. Is it inky black or almost white, or somewhere in between?
When looking at something nearby, you are probably aware of the sharp edge that exists between one shape and another. When looking at something far away, the edge between two shapes is less distinct.
In landscape paintings, what matters to the viewer is whether the distant mountains seem to be far away, and the objects in the foreground seem close. To the artist, it’s a matter of shape, value and edge.
The Delight of Nature
We have had a string of cool, cloudy, rainy days recently. Cloudy is OK if the sun shines periodically enabling the artist to see shadows because shadows are important for landscape paintings to look natural. Cloudy is also OK if no shade is available because your canvas is not supposed to be in the sun. It gives the artist a false sense of color in that colors often appear to be lighter than they would in shade or indoors.
Recently, I found a quote by Winston Churchill that expresses how I feel. “A heightened sense of the observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint”.
Degas: The Ballerinas
Edgar Degas (1934-1917) was classically trained by a student of Ingres and his work shows emphasis on linear drawing and composition. three dimensional depth, and firm contours. “No art is less spontaneous than mine,” he said. The many preparatory sketches he made set him apart from the Impressionists, yet he was counted a member because of friendship with the group, commitment to contemporary subjects and his opposition to official academic painting.
Degas’ specialty was the human form in a moment of arrested motion. He took great care to show his dancers off-guard while yawning or adjusting their slippers. He painted them from oblique angles, typically clustered to one side with a large area of floor space. His nudes were shown doing utilitarian tasks, such as combing their hair, unaware of observation and off balance – as though seen “through a keyhole.”
As his eyesight failed, he turned to pastels which allowed him to draw and color at the same time. Nearly blind, he relied on his sense of touch to model wax figurines of dancers and horses which were cast in bronze after his death.
Painting Surfaces
The most popular surface for oil painting is canvas, made of either cotton or linen, and stretched over a wooden frame, called a “stretcher”. The canvas is “primed” with a thick coat of white gesso by the manufacturer but can be lightly sanded and more gesso can be added by the artist. These priming coats are called the “ground”.Pissarro on Painting
Camille Pizzarro was approximately ten years older than Cezanne. He was a man of stable personality and very much a part of the Naturalist group as he took his easel and paints daily to the out-of-doors and painted. According to Jack Lindsay’s book: the painter L. LeBdel has given us a clear account of Pissarro’s attitudes and advice:
Seek out for yourself a type of nature which suits your temperament. One should observe forms and colours in a motif rather than drawing. Accurate drawing is dry and destroys the impression of the whole. The brush stroke, the right shade of colour, and the right degree of brightness should create the drawing. Paint the essential character of things and don’t worry about technique.
These are guidelines which those who use the Impressionist style still use in their landscape paintings.
Plein Air Painting
A friend loaned me the book Cezanne – his Life and Art, by Jack Lindsay, which Arts Review says “must surely become the definitive source-book for the relation between his life and his art”. It illustrates the struggles he had in becoming an artist as well as problems all the Impressionists had in being accepted by the Salon and the public.
Each of the Impressionists had his/her own style, of course. They originally called themselves Naturalists because they tried to paint the way things really looked in nature, rather than in the traditional imaginative situations. Their landscape paintings broke with tradition and were painted outdoors en plein air.