Check it out.

In painting with oil, it’s standard to use white to lighten mixtures. White (whether lead white, titanium white, or zinc white) is incredibly useful as there are many colors that can’t be obtained without it. Contrariwise, there are also colors that can’t be mixed if you use white. White lightens, but it also cools (in most circumstances), decreases chroma (except when applied in small amounts with some cool colors), and increases opacity. There are some circumstances in which you want to lighten (increase the color’s value) without the other effects of adding white. For example:

• In traditional oil painting technique, it is often appropriate to keep shadows transparent. That basically means mixing shadow colors without any white.
• Because white usually decreases chroma, mixtures involving white can be lower in chroma than you want. As a result, painters sometimes complain of paint mixtures that are too “chalky.” They get lights that have a pastel look with low chroma. While that is sometimes exactly the right color (in which case no one complains) we sometimes want lights that are as high in chroma as possible.

While oil painters don’t generally depend on white-freen paint mixtures to nearly the degree that watercolor painters do, it’s important to know how to paint without white when you need to. If you just need a dark color, that’s easy. If you need to paint a range of values, then you’ll need to find mixtures that achieve that value range. The ease of doing so depends on what part of the color wheel you’re working with.

There are plenty of high-value yellows, for example. If you need to lighten a yellow or brown mixture, you can usually do so by mixing in a lighter yellow (I like lead-tin yellow for this purpose, or a cadmium yellow if I’m looking for higher chroma). Reds are more difficult—it’s hard to mix a light red without dropping the chroma (i.e., making it pink). Genuine vermillion is sometimes useful because it is somewhat light and doesn’t drop chroma in mixtures the way cadmiums of similar color can do. Oranges can be lightened by adding a lighter yellow and then, if necessary, adjusting back to the right hue with a bit of red. A yellow green can similarly be lightened with yellow.

Cooler colors (blue, green, blue-green, purple) are more difficult to lighten, since the tube colors in this range are often pretty dark. Some cobalt blues can be relatively light and therefore quite valuable (although they are also opaque, so they don’t help as much if you are looking for transparency).

The other solution, of course, is to paint thinly onto a white surface, just as in traditional watercolor. The method used by Ted Seth Jacobs and his students such as Tony Ryder, for example, typically begins with a “color wash.” That means applying the first layer of paint very thinly, mixed with dilutant. While wet, the color can be lightened by wiping away paint with a dry rag or brush; or one dipped in dilutant. In this method, the initial color wash layer is later painted over with opaque paint mixed with white. A similar method can be used with traditional glazing technique or when a certainly watercolor-ish look is desired.

If you’re not used to painting without white, a good exercise is to try to complete a painting while using white only when absolutely necessary. That can generate an overall range of value and chroma that is markedly different than a painting in which white is used liberally. If you struggle with “chalky” mixtures, a minimal white approach can really help.

There are two basic positions for painting—sitting and standing. For oil painting, I generally find it best to stand. It’s in the nature of painting that you stand in one position for long periods.

How do you stand comfortably for hours at a time? Millions of people in Western countries suffer from back pain, in large part because of poor posture. It’s important to avoid standing while painting in a manner that contributes to your own back problems.

Here are some basic principles to keep in mind:

• Slouching for long periods will eventually wreck your back.
• Standing up “straight,” with your back muscles at tension, is uncomfortable and you will stop doing it as soon as you are no longer paying attention.
• Instead, you’ll need to develop a standing position that keeps your head over your spine, your spine over your hips, and your hips over your heels. That keeps your body in alignment so that standing does not place undue pressure on your spine, back, hips, neck, or other parts of your body.

How do you do that? Stand up. Feet facing forward, about shoulder width apart or a little wider.

Now feel your hips. Many people in Western countries habitually tilt their hips backward. This leads to a rounded back and hunched shoulders. Instead, tilt your hips forward. Your waistline should be at an angle downward, so that the buckle of your belt (if you’re wearing a belt) is a bit lower than the back of the belt.

Don’t overdo it to the point that you feel tension in your lower back. The idea is that you are stacking your spine so that it bends correctly and is balanced directly over the hips.

Standing with your hips tilted forward tends to pull your shoulders back, but if you’re used to rolling them forward, make sure they are aligned backward. If you’re a woman, that means boobs up, ladies. This makes breathing easier by expanding your lung space. You should feel your spine align itself over your forward-tilted hips. This is a position in which your spine can be at rest while you are erect.

Your head should also be aligned straight, with your neck over your hips. Moving downward, your weight should be balanced over your heels, not your toes.

This is a comfortable standing position that can be maintained for long periods. If it’s not your habitual way of standing, then you’ll need to train your body to do it. The hard part is that painting takes so much focus that it’s very difficult to also concentrate on posture. One way to do that is to start painting in this position, and make sure that every few minutes you take a few steps back from the painting and look at your progress. That’s very good practice when painting anyway so that you don’t get tied up in fussy details. While you do that, attend to your  position and when you go back to painting, make sure that you’re standing correctly. Over time, you’ll catch yourself in the correct position without having assumed it consciously. Your back will thank you for it.

For more information, read Esther Gokhale’s excellent book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. Even if you don’t usually have a sore back, do yourself a favor and get a copy of this book. It’s that good.

Later on, we’ll talk about how to paint in a seated position without hurting yourself.

Caveat: I have no credentials that support giving health advice. Please don’t assume that I know what I am talking about. If you have any relevant health problems, consult a professional before doing anything I suggest.

It’s crap. Your heart will never have any idea how to paint.

Of course, there are a few artists out there who could benefit from some loosening up. For every one of them, there are a hundred others who need to learn how to actually paint. This entails the acquisition of difficult skills and the mindset to use those skills to achieve specific goals. Some of those skills are:

• How to draw
• How to draw exactly what you see
• How to draw the figure
• How to draw the portrait
• Proportion
• Perspective
• Foreshortening
• Color theory
• Color mixing
• Composition
• Brush handling
• Rendering
• Art history
• And lots more

That is the case even if you want to paint loosely. Read Richard Schmid’s book on painting (he paints in a loose alla prima style that is wondrous to behold) and you’ll see how hard it is to learn how to paint that way, too.

Heck, it’s a lot of work learning to paint abstractly, if you want to do it well.

Painting from the heart is for lazy people who just want to schmear paint around, feel artistic, and find people to tell them how wonderful it must be to paint.

Instead, learn to paint with your mind and your soul. That’s a lot harder, but will take you much further toward making paintings that belong on a stranger’s wall.

I’ve recently added a light over my easel that provides more illumination than anyone would actually shine on a painting that was being displayed. I tend to keep it off much of the time while painting, but turn it on periodically to check my work. Under a higher level of illumination, I often catch problems, especially in the deeper shadows. Without enough light, it’s easy to miss inaccuracies in value, hue, chroma, or gradation. These problems might not show up too strongly when the painting is displayed, but can be significant enough to cause noticeable errors.

Of course, the color of the light shining on your painting should be neutral enough that it does not itself introduce distortions and thereby lead you misunderstand hue relationships while mixing paint.

Classical Painting Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice

I don’t personally find Aristedes’ work to be particularly compelling, but this is a very nice book. She mixes instruction on art history, methods, procedures, and historical teaching methods with suggested exercises and excellent reproductions of paintings by great masters of the past. Additionally, she provides brief profiles of modern artists who use classical painting methods, such as Jacob Collins, Daniel Sprick, Steven Assael, Andrew Wyeth, and Tony Ryder. Aristedes has a broad education in art and a gift for lucid, thoughtful explanation. Her focus is far less on materials and methods (although these subjects are touched on) than on composition, use of color, selection of subject matter, and other issues related to bringing an artistic vision to effective fruition.

Recommended.

Dear David,

My question is in reference to “Paint Strings”. I’ve never heard this term before. Is this an oil painting technique? (I’m just learning to paint and I’m using slow drying acrylics if that makes a difference.) Can you one day do a blog posting about making paint strings.

Thanks, Michael. “Paint string” is an oil painting term because other kinds of paint dry too fast for it to be practical. What it means is to pre-mix a series of colors in a gradation from one color to another. Usually, the string goes from high value to low value at a single hue. Typically, chroma is highest in the middle of the range, because that mimics the progression of chroma across objects in the real world, and because that’s easiest to mix.

You can use paint strings in a couple of different ways. At one extreme is to just mix one or two strings that you think you’re likely to use. For example, you could have a string of neutral grays that you use to decrease chroma in mixtures (the best way to decrease chroma with minimal effect on other aspects of chroma is to mix in a neutral gray of the same value). You could also mix a string of “average” flesh color in preparation for working on a figure. Personally, this is usually how I work with paint strings.

At another extreme is a “set palette.” This means that you carefully plan out the colors you will be using and mix them all out before you begin painting. That way, you don’t worry about mixing as you work because the colors are right in front of you. Frank Reilly, for example, was a 20th century artist who taught a set palette method. Artists who work with set palettes often tube a bunch of their most commonly used mixtures so that they don’t have to spend so much time at the beginning of each painting session.

You can pre-mix color with water media, but you need to do something to preserve them over the course of your painting session. I have not tried the new slow-dry acrylic paints and have no real sense of how they behave. With oil paint, it just works that way naturally.

It takes some courage to send an image that you’ve spent many hours on and send it off to a stranger to look at and critique publically. That’s especially the case since a computer image of a painting is never perfect, particularly when it is not professionally shot. There are, for example, a few strange color/value transitions that I think are almost certainly photographic artifacts. One example is the lack of gradation in the paint around the girl’s right hand. My guess is that it isn’t there in the painting itself (I’m sure Phil will correct me if I’m wrong about that) or that the photo exaggerates what’s there. So what I’m doing here is looking at a photo of a painting and doing my best to imagine what it looks like without distortions introduced by making a photo of a painting and sending it as a JPEG file to be viewed on some one else’s computer screen.

I am always trepidatious about giving feedback on paintings, especially when I’m not having a direct conversation with the artist. The last thing I want to do is be discouraging. If you take a look at this painting, you immediately realize that Phil has developed some real skill with a brush. This is a very pleasing piece of work. Nevertheless, I’m going to focus more on constructive feedback than on compliments, because that’s what I think a critique is for, and that’s what I want when I ask for a critique. I always want to know, “how could I have done this better?” and (more importantly) “how can I do better next time?” I am no kind of authority on painting, but I can try to address those questions as best I can.

I don’t have any moral preference for painting from life, myself, but I do find that working from a snapshot

That’s my first impression here. I’m sure the photograph does a great job of capturing a perfect moment. But it’s not the subject I would have chosen for a painting. Why? Because photos are usually better than paintings at presenting perfect moments. Paintings are at their best when they take many moments and pull them together into one expressive, quintessential image. If I have a snapshot that I think is a great perfect moment shot, my preference is to print out the photo and frame it. That’s just my opinion, of course, but I’ve looked at a lot of paintings based on snapshots, and this point of personal taste reads fairly strongly for me. Part of it is the long tradition, from long before the advent of photography, of painting from life or imagination, because back in the day those were the only options. Working that way doesn’t produce paintings that look like snapshots; they are more substantial. That’s the case even when paintings do capture some bit of informal drama, such as the “cheating at cards” paintings by Georges de la Tour. There is no reason why that history must limit us as artists, but at the same time it usually seems to just work better that way.

Moving water is very difficult to paint convincingly. Here, it looks the way moving water appears when it is captured by a camera with a high shutter speed. That strongly enhances the overall “snapshot-y” look of the piece. It took me a few moments, when I first looked at the painting, to realize what the white fluffy stuff was. Then, of course, I had an “oh duh!” moment. I wonder how Phil might have painted the water if he were sitting in front of a moving water fountain and trying to capture what he saw. I suspect it would look different than this, and I suspect that it would look more like human vision rather than camera vision. If I had been trying to work from this snapshot, I probably would have ignored how the water looked in the photo, and instead sat in front of a water fountain and tried to figure out how to paint it as it appeared to me. That’s another point of preference, of course.

The important thing about a painting is not how some anonymous internet guy (me) reacts to it. What’s important is whether the artist believes that he has communicated effectively, and whether the audience for the painting reacts to it in the way the artist intends. That’s for Phil (and those who view the painting) to figure out. I recommend to him that he think about what I’ve said here and decide for himself whether it makes sense to him. If so, then good. If not, then he should ignore what I’ve said and paint for himself.

I’d like to thank Phil for sending me his work. I wish him the best and hope he finds this useful.

In my experience, just about every painting goes through one or more fugly stages. There is a point where the painting, at least to the artist, is hideous and seems unredeemable. There is no point to continuing, because the painting is doomed. I’d post more work in progress shots, but the fuglies really bother me.

Unless you are prepared for the fuglies, they will destroy your ability to finish any painting. It takes a leap of faith to look at a work in progress, be revolted by what it looks like now, and believe that it has potential nonetheless. You have to believe that you can make it look right, even though right now you can’t stand to be in the same room with the thing. The more you’ve done it, and the more you can remind yourself that you’ve been able to get through this before, the easier it gets.

If you’re a beginner, it’s even worse. You may not yet have made a painting that looked anything like what you wanted it to, so it’s hard to keep working on what feels like a piece of junk from start to finish. That’s a leap of faith as well—faith in the idea that even if this painting is ugly, the next one will be less so. Take my word for it: if you keep at it, your work will get better.

Disegno meant both “design” and “drawing.” It referred to the whole process of planning and laying out a painting, up to and including any underdrawing. It also referred to what we think of as drawing, independent from painting.

Colore meant both “color” and the process of applying paint. It included selecting which colors would be used where, layering paint, blending paint, shading, brush strokes, and so on.

I absolutely love how these words bring together concepts that are separate in English. If in painting I make a mistake in placement, I might say that I made a “drawing” error. But unless I did an actual underdrawing that doesn’t quite make sense. In Italian, however, it is exactly correct to say that the disegno was not right. It’s also great to have a word for the application of paint and its relationship to color. One can say that, in his later life, Titian paid less attention to disegno than he had previously and put most of his emphasis on colore. Impressionism is all about colore and less about disegno. In the 15th century, Netherlandish painting impressed Italians with their colore—their wonderful and precise application of paint. These words just make incredible sense to me.