Major Site Upgrades
1) I've added a big tutorial and demonstration section to my portrait site:
The new section has advice on getting started painting on a budget. There are painting tutorials such as how to blend paint and how to paint eyes. I've also got many detailed portrait tutorials. You'll recognize some of the articles from early posts on this blog. I decided to revamp them into a more permanent resource on my site.
2) On my landscape site, I've added five galleries of backpacking photos to the About the Artist section. Travis and I take many photos on our backcountry trips, and these landscapes provide much of the inspiration behind my paintings.
Blending Colors on your Palette
This is a quick demonstration of my color blending method, and how you can use it to mix shades if you're learning how to paint. Beginners have a tendency to overmix their paint and work from a few pre-mixed shades, resulting in flat colors and paint-by-number paintings. This is my technique for making a wide variety of shades very quickly as you work.
To start, put dabs of paint on your palette a few centimeters apart. Try to distribute the paint so that the colors you'll be mixing will be close to each other, but don't overthink it. Some artists use a circular arrangement of paint on the palette, I tend to just make a few groups of colors with some space in between. For the demo, I'm just using two colors, yellow and green.
Art Photography by Travis
I'm Kathryn's husband, Travis. My day-job is physics, but I'm also an amateur photographer. Since we got a digital SLR camera last year, I've done all the photography of Kathryn's finished paintings. (Kathryn takes the progress photos for her blog using a simple point-and-click digital camera, but large, high quality images are needed for prints.) There was a request a little while ago for information on how to take photos of paintings, so I'll explain my technique.
If your artwork is small, you can scan it using a flatbed scanner. However, for paintings bigger than 11x14", it's hard to find a scanner large enough, so photography is the best option.
Portrait of Dad, Age 8
Dad was a good sport for letting me put this picture of him on the internet. This is a pencil crayon portrait I drew of my father when I was about 8 years old. I've been reading up on human portrait techniques now that I am painting one, and I thought this picture would be useful to illustrate a common mistake when drawing faces.
Planning Composition in Photoshop
This is a project I've been working on for quite a while and recently completed. The painting is for a set of Christmas cards, featuring the family dog, Duke, a yellow Lab.
Read the rest of this post...Acrylic Painting Outdoors
I've taken my easel on the road this weekend to enjoy some of the great weather in Yosemite. Here's a picture of my outdoor studio setup:
Day/Night Glow Landscape
I've been experimenting with a new type of paint over the last week because I wanted to try creating a landscape scene that changed from day to night. One of my favorite parts of going backpacking is getting out of the city and sleeping under the stars.
This is an idea I have reworked several times in the past, but I was always disappointed with the result because of the old glow paint, which didn't glow for very long and came only in lime green. The new generation of glow pigments are brighter and longer-lasting than the traditional glow-in-the-dark paints. Best of all, they come in many colors and are available as pure powder pigment, so you can mix them with your favorite kind of paint or gel medium. You can buy phosphorescent pigment through online specialty shops such as Ready Set Glo.
Brush Techniques for Grass and Trees
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Four Beginner Painter Mistakes
And I've made them all...
1) Staying in one place while you paint
You'll be surprised how much the viewer's distance from the painting will affect how it looks. What looks blocky and uneven at a working distance may look fine from a few meters away. Think about how far away your painting will be viewed, and check it periodically from that distance. Same goes for lighting: if your painting won't normally have a bright light shining on it, make sure you check it under the light conditions it will be displayed. I often take my half-finished paintings off the easel and hang them on the wall, then sit on the couch and have a snack while I make a mental list of what to correct.
When Your Painting Isn't Going Well
I find that with nearly every one of my paintings there is a point, usually near the beginning, where it just looks terrible and I want to throw it in the garbage and start over. I think this is a hurdle that a lot of new artists never get over, so I want to discuss what to do when you're at this point, and how to get through it.
By far the biggest part of knowing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em is experience, of course. I had to struggle through a lot of paintings to know that this, or this:
Transparency
This is a commissioned painting I finished last week of Loyalsock Creek in Pennsylvania. This was a very difficult painting and I've posted it because I learned some useful layering tricks.
Masking Tape
This post is about the wonders of masking tape. Discovering masking tape was a big step for me, yet I find it's not often mentioned in art instruction books. I use masking tape on almost every painting I do. Here's what I've found:
Masking tape is great for horizon lines.
My old method was to paint the sky, then paint the land or water area, and touch up the edges of each until I got a roughly straight line. The problem was, I can't paint a straight line! And even if I could, it would take way too long, and result in a muddy, indistinct horizon from all that painting over.