Further Fields of Study

by pamneely on December 2, 2010

Painting and drawing will help you acquire an appreciation of other paintings. This is a good thing because you will get little help from an art gallery or museum where you are left very much to your own devices.

Visiting an art gallery can be a very confusing, tiring business if you don’t know what to look for. Paintings are often jumbled up without reference to period or time. No help is given to the visitor who is likely to see work from the eighteenth century next to painting done today.

To help you to understand these paintings, it is a good idea to obtain reproductions of the works you see; not to hang, but to analyze. And one of the best ways to do this is to draw over them on tracing paper the strong lines of the compositions and freely copy them in color in your own style. During this practice ideas and misconceptions about them will change. You will be understanding them, which is much better. Tracing over them will help you in other ways as well. Through your own experience you will get inside the picture. You will see whether the artist achieved what he set out to do or not. It will also give you ideas that will enhance your own work.

You will also find that you will acquire discrimination in other fields of art: architecture, sculpture, pottery, illustration, textile design, interiors, furniture, posters, and so on. This is because the principles contained in painting and drawing are also contained in these other forms of art.

Later you may want to try your hand at etching, lithography, wood and lino cutting. Here, too, you will find that your practice in drawing and painting will stand you in good stead.

Read as many books on art and its history as you have time to. But keep a keen sense of balance and don’t believe all you read. You will know what is feasible and what is not if you rely on your own experience as a practicing artist and by using a little common sense.

Look upon the new with caution and always be ready to abandon the old. You won’t go far wrong if you do.

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Framing Drawings, Watercolors and Oils

by pamneely on December 1, 2010

It is not easy to frame your own watercolors. For one thing, unless you are an expert carpenter, you not only have the labor of cutting the molding, but you have to cut the glass and the mount as well.

Instead, it is better to go to a competent frame maker. If he is a good one he will know just what moulding and mount to suggest, but if you are doubtful of his judgment, these are the points to remember:

1. The moulding must be neat and simple. Any fancy carving will detract from your picture. The moulding should be natural wood, or, if colored, neutral in tone. If the coloring becomes dirty, it should clean off easily if the moulding has been well treated. Fancy moulding is difficult to keep clean.

2. The mount should be off-white, or colored only if it does not clash with your watercolor. A bold gouache or tempera may be enhanced by a colored mount, but not a delicate watercolor. Unprimed, unbleached canvas makes a good neutral surround to a watercolor, but the frame maker must be skilled at fixing it on to the mount. A badly mounted canvas surround will ruin your picture. The mount should be generous in proportion. A thin mount looks mean and won’t show off the picture to its best advantage.

It used to be fashionable to put lines round the mount, making a frame within a frame. But this I find fussy and distracting and entirely unnecessary.

FRAMING OILS

Again, unless you are a good carpenter, it is better to go to a good frame maker for your frames. And, like water color frames, they should be simple. A highly decorated frame is often expensive and hard to keep clean. A simply designed frame will suit nearly all types of paintings, whereas only a few can stand up to masses of curls and squiggles. They are heavy to handle and difficult to hang. Unless you have the good fortune to live in a mansion, they will look out of place in a modern house.

Gold in small proportions enhances an oil painting but it must be gold leaf which is expensive. Other kinds of gold paint or leaf tend to tarnish and look shoddy after a while. So if you cannot afford pure gold leaf, it is better to leave the substitutes alone entirely and have them colored in a simple neutral tone to go with the scheme of your painting.

No painting, whether large or small, looks well in a mean frame. Have a generously proportioned frame. If you have painted on canvas, instead of a frame a strip of wood neatly tacked round flush with the surface will stop the painting from looking raw. However this method won’t work with board. Board should go into a proper frame.

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Framing

November 30, 2010

Framing a watercolor will obviously be different from framing an oil. For instance, it is usual to put drawings and watercolors under glass for protection. An oil can be left exposed, so long as it is given a coat of varnish. This does not keep off all the dust from obscuring the painting, but will [...]

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Summing up about composition

November 29, 2010

If you have stained your canvas with a tint derived from your color scheme, you will see that unlike painting directly on to a white surface, the colors you start with don’t seem so out of place. They sit nicely on the canvas. On a white surface they would stand out sharply and only settle [...]

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Completing the Picture

November 28, 2010

When painting up the picture on to the canvas, you may find it useful to have all your drawings ready to hand to refer to. You may also wish to have a color scheme to work from. You will get a better result if you have some idea what colors you are going to use, [...]

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Squaring Up

November 27, 2010

Some painters find squaring up their final drawings or cartoons irksome and feel that they would like to go straight on to painting up their final design. I hold no firm ideas about this. If you are confident and have the skill, you might manage to do this without any muddle. But for those who [...]

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How to create a composition

November 26, 2010

If you have the drawings, lay them about you, think about them, choose a central theme and, on a separate sheet of paper, draw out some rectangles, say about 4 in. X 2 in., and fill them with different arrangements. Play about with these arrangements, try this combination and then that. Don’t be afraid to [...]

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Beginning a Picture

November 25, 2010

Because everything must be contained in a rectangle we must allow for a certain compression. However, no matter how much we are forced to change our original idea or drawing, the vitality and force of that idea will be retained when all the changes take on a unity. To make a picture function, each part [...]

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Working with space

November 24, 2010

Space, actual three-dimensional space, cannot be achieved in any way on a canvas, but by illusion, perspective, tonality and the like you may be deceived into thinking that the picture has depth. Space and the painting of space has occupied various artists from time to time throughout history. Paolo Uccello (1397-1475), an Italian painter, was [...]

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Movement on a Canvas

November 23, 2010

We cannot make our paint move, but by a careful placing of our lines and shapes with the canvas we can make the spectator’s eye move. And because it is so important to achieve movement within a frame we must consider it in the same way as we did the simple placing of our shapes [...]

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