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Category: Monday Morning Art School

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Monday Morning Art School: taking risks

Painting is inherently exploratory, so there’s no sense revisiting what you already know.
Parrsboro basin, by Carol L. Douglas. This was my two-hour quick-draw.
I just came back from Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival, where I painted with my pal Poppy Balser. Several times, we discussed the question of whether one should take risks in a competitive event, or save those paintings for times when one is under no pressure.
Risk-taking falls into three categories:
  1. Changing materials and tools;
  2. Compositional or technical changes;
  3. New subject matter.

Painting with Poppy at Parrsboro. Say that ten times fast. (Photo courtesy of Anne Wedler.)

The latter is the easiest to address. I heard several people say, “I’m not a boat painter” right before they attempted the devilishly-difficult fleet standing against the seawall at Advocate Harbor. I ama boat painter and the boats of Nova Scotia have defeated me many times. These are the highest tides in the world, and they move with heady speed. As they drop, they leave the short, squat trawlers standing upright on the shingle.
That doesn’t mean I don’t try; I am not in Nova Scotia fishing waters often enough to let the opportunity slide by. My error was in dragging a 16X20 canvas down onto the wet sand and trying to finish it before the tide and weather moved in. Devoting a day to painting something I didn’t know was no mistake.
Peek-a-Boo Island, by Carol L. Douglas
Changing up your method is a different question. There really is only one sure-fire way of applying oil paints in the field, but within that, there are many variations. Equally true, watercolor is almost universally applied light-to-dark, but there are variations within that, too. By the time an artist has gotten accepted into a major show, the process is usually solidly established. However, things happen to upset that. At Rye’s Painters on Location a few years ago, I lost my painting medium. Tarryl Gabel kindly shared some gel medium. It softened everything up, and I found myself painting in far greater detail than is my wont.
This time I used a new titanium white which was much oilier than my usual paint. And I painted on a new substrate, a clear birch board. The board was a fabulous success; the former not so much.
Poppy Balser with her two competition paintings. The one at left won Best in Show.
Poppy took more compositional risks than did I. Her two paintings entered for the competition were of the weir in dim light and another looking straight up a cliffside of sedimentary rock. In the weir painting, the subject is strongly foreshortened and dark on one side. In the hands of a less-adroit painter, it could have resulted in a balance issue, but it was far more interesting than the usual composition. Her risk-taking paid off handsomely. She won Best in Show.
However, behind that painting was three years of painting the weir from every angle and in every different lighting condition. The herring weir is Poppy’s Mont Sainte-Victoire. I’ve personally seen her do at least fifteen paintings of it. That deep familiarity means she can take risks with the shape and composition. She’s stared at it for so many hours that it’s become intimately familiar to her.
In the end, all our solemn pondering of risk-taking was so much hot air. Eventually, the risks always won out. Painting is inherently exploratory. There’s no sense revisiting what you already know; that always leads to boredom.

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Monday Morning Art School: The seven deadly sins of plein air painting.

Here are some easy ways to condemn your outdoor painting. Try to avoid them!
October afternoon at Beauchamp point, by Carol L. Douglas. The weight is off the edge, and the rocks are accurate. Now if I could just remember what I did with this painting.
Weight all to one side. Often, we’re attracted to a scene where a large, dark mass in the foreground breaks to show us a distant, high-key vista, like mountains or the sea. That is very appealing in life, but plopping a large object on the far side of your canvas is simple bad design. Look for ways to balance lights and darks. Breaks in the tree screen, changing the angle, or some value adjustments will make it flow better.
It’s easy to throw all the weight on one side when drawing a shoreline or a mountain vista.
Tchotchkes to try to fix a bad composition. Yes, there are boats, branches and gulls in nature, and they have a place in your painting. They shouldn’t be added at the last minute to fix an unbalanced composition. If you find yourself frequently tempted to add ornaments at the last minute, you’re probably not spending enough time on your drawing.
Tossing a gull, a branch, or a boat in there at the last minute is just going to look goofy.
Going straight to canvas. A good drawing—in a sketchbook, not on your canvas—sometimes seems like a waste of time, but it serves three important purposes. It’s how you sort out good vs. bad compositions. It gives you a chance to explore the subject without making a muddy mess with paint. And it gives you reference that can outlast changes in the weather, the light, or even your subject leaving. 
Marking outlines on a viewfinder is no substitute for a good sketch, which is why I don’t permit them in my classes. The primary point of a sketch is to think.
No focal point(s). A painting is read by its viewers, and part of your job is to control how they do that. You may have only one focus, or you may have several that are noticed in order of importance. Your preparatory drawing should have helped you narrow this down. Now it’s your job to make those points draw your viewer. How do you do this? You have color, line and detail to drive the viewer’s eyes.
Shorelines are not perfect ellipses.

Too much detail too soon. Detail is the last thing you should worry about when painting. Your masses should be blocked in, shadows laid down, and colors organized before you worry about the texture of trees, rocks and grass. 

Think for a moment what it would be like if you could see every leaf and blade of grass simultaneously. Our eyes protect the brain from snapping with overstimulation by only focusing on one thing at a time. Do your viewers a favor and make those choices when you’re painting. Apply detail sparingly.

Not seeing past the shore ellipse. Perfect ellipses are lovely in painting, but they’re not great for shorelines. Most shorelines don’t curve perfectly, but are broken by irregularities. Even when they’re perfectly smooth, they curve less at the top than at the bottom—that’s perspective. And within the curve of a cove, there are waves and tidal lines that break the regularity. If you’re going to draw the long curve of a shore, take the time to learn its real shape. And you don’t need to include the whole, long edge for the viewer to get the point.
A trifecta of bad design: a goofy ellipse, all the trees on one side, and a gull added to try to balance the composition.
Rocks are not potatoes, and trees are not popsicles. When I painted in Scotland last month, the first thing I noticed is that the granite rising out of the North Atlantic wasn’t exactly the same as the granite on the American side. The Iona stone is pinker and studded with greenstone. 
Different minerals cleave and erode differently. How they break and tumble gives rock faces their character. Rocks are almost never brown or simple grey. They’re an amalgam of beautiful colors ranging from blue-green to burnt orange. Likewise, trees branch very differently depending on their species. Foliage colors vary, as does the density of the canopy.

You don’t need to be a geologist or botanist to notice and appreciate these differences, and getting them right is what gives a painting authenticity.

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Monday Morning Art School: packing for overseas trips

Leave home the flammable chemicals, make sure your passport is current, and you should be fine.
I like Panel-Pak carriers but usually run short of slots on a long trip.
Most problems with painting in other countries are due to flight regulations, not your destination. I haven’t had a problem flying with my paints since the early days after 9/11, but they are in a clearly-labeled clear-plastic bag.
Do not bring large tubes of oil paints in your carry-on luggage; they exceed the 3 oz. rule. It is not necessary to empty your pochade box if it still has useful paint on it; paint is no more volatile on the palette than it is in a tube.
According to the FAA, nonflammable paints are those with a flashpoint above 140° F (60° C). Linseed oil has a flashpoint above 550°F. This information is found on the product’s material safety data sheet (MSDS). The flash point is in section 9 of the MSDS. Section 14 indicates if the product is regulated for transportation. Here is a PDF for Gamblin Oil Colors’ general artist oil colors sheet.
My paints are in a clear plastic bag with a label written by Lori Putnam, which I print from the Gamblin website.
Gamsol has a flash point of 144° F, which makes it theoretically transportable by plane, but I’ve never done it. The FAA itself says “paint thinners, turpentine, and brush cleaners are flammable liquids and may not be carried in carry-on or checked baggage.” Odorless mineral spirits (called ‘white spirits’ in some countries) are cheap and easy to buy in any art store. One quart lasts me two weeks.
Don’t plan on bringing medium, either. Most of them have naphtha added as a drying agent. This is a volatile petroleum solvent, more powerful than mineral spirits, and it has a low flash point. It appears across a wide range of pre-mixed mediums including alkyl gels (such as Galkyd) and the Grumbacher mediums that I prefer.
Don’t forget the rain gear, especially in Scotland.
Your choices are to buy a small bottle at your destination, paint without medium, or use a traditional drying oil like linseed oil. If you choose to do the latter, remember that it will dry more slowly. Plan accordingly to carry your wet canvases home.
I use PanelPak wet canvas carriers, but there are times (like this morning) when I have more wet canvases than slots. If paintings are almost dry and have little impasto, interleaving them with wax paper will get them home safely. If you have a mess of wet canvases, you may need to improvise. Your goal is to create a space between the canvas boards. The easiest way is to cut cardboard or plastic spacers. Once the strips and the boards are in a stable pile, I tape or tie the whole mess together. Carry the gooiest ones, or the ones you like best, in your carrier.
Interleaved wax paper can stop almost-dry paintings from sticking to each other.
Americans already live in the world’s largest art market, so traveling to other countries to work doesn’t make a lot of sense. Still, it sometimes happens. You may need a work visa. This is a laborious process. Ask the organizer of your event for documentation.
Our State Department maintains a list of travel advisories for foreign destinations. These include additional-vaccination suggestions. Some foreign destinations require visas. Others require that you have at least six months left on a passport. You should check with your health insurance provider about whether you’re covered abroad, and with your auto insurance provider about whether your policy covers an international rental car.
But for gooey paintings, you’re going to need to improvise some kind of spacer strip.
You will need power adapters for most foreign destinations. I find a USB power bank very useful for long plane trips. And I just smile and pay the $10 a day fee to use my cell phone overseas; without that, you wouldn’t be reading this blog this morning.
Here is my personal packing list, and here are supply lists for oils, watercolor, and acrylicsupplies. I print the relevant ones every time I pack and use them as a checklist.
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Monday Morning Art School: Aging the model

Aging is highly individual but it follows certain predictable paths. Here are some hints to drawing plausible older people.
The Ancient of Days, William Blake, 1794. Relief etching with watercolor. The figure is a curious pastiche of an older face and a young body. Courtesy British Museum

Last week, I shared a drawing of my model in which I managed to make her look fifteen years old.

No two people age the same way. That’s especially true in our modern world, where aging gracefully is a sign of affluence. Many of us have had discreet work ‘done’—including me—and we live less-taxing lives than our ancestors. We keep our hair and brows more stylishly than our forebearers. Most of us retain our teeth; in the US, we keep them whitened. On the other hand, more of us are plagued by obesity, which ages our faces.
Our experiences leave their mark. The weather-beaten lobsterman and an office-worker will age quite differently. The northeastern US is kind to skin, because it’s humid and cool, whereas the sun of the southwest is harsh.
Portrait of the Artist’s Mother at the Age of 63. Albrecht DĂźrer, courtesy Kupferstichkabinett. In one sense, this is an example of how dramatically aging has changed, but if you get past the toothlessness, the changes happen the same way today. Note the cording of her neck and the receding temple.
The human face can be ennobled by ascetism or coarsened by consumption, depending on how we’ve lived. Smokers develop a system of wrinkles because nicotine causes narrowing of the blood vessels in the epidermis.  And then there’s the thing none of us can do anything about: our genes.
Our culture venerates the 25-year-old face, but our faces settle into maturity once we pass thirty. By our fifties, those changes are accelerating rapidly, as our face assumes its elderly shape.
There are more telling signs of aging in the face than wrinkles. The eye socket becomes deeper, leading to pouching under the eyes. Closely related to this, the temples deepen and cheekbones become more evident. As if to compensate for this increased definition above the cheekbones, the lower parts of our faces sag. The flesh of our cheeks droops. Creases form along our noses and mouths.
A very unflattering selfie taken this morning showing the recession at the temples and delineation of the cheekbones. When I was younger, my face was nearly a perfect oval, but I’ve managed to get it all stretched out by now. (The bags under my eyes are just tiredness.)

Our noses and earlobes grow all our lives. The tip of the nose may turn downward in a person lucky enough to achieve extreme old age. The soft tissue below our jaw starts to sag. The cords of ours neck become more visible after age 60.

At around age 40, a series of furrows appear on our faces. They can be vertical between the brows and along the mouth, but are often horizontal. Most of us don’t get every possible wrinkle, but merely the ones to which we’re predisposed. Wrinkles are not lines or cracks, but folds of skin. Lines are a poor way of representing them.
Head of an Old Man, 1521, Albrecht DĂźrer, courtesy of the Albertina. Wrinkles are folds, not crevasses. 
Our skin becomes less luminous in middle age, but often in extreme old age it regains the translucence of childhood.
One of the most telling signs of age is the thickness of our hair. In both genders, hairlines recede and our hair thins. Again, this is an area of aging where much work is done to conceal changes but it would be odd to see a glorious mane of hair on an elderly person.
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Monday Morning Art School: Add back the banned black

A color exercise that can be done with anything from a dime-store watercolor kit to a professional palette.
The Servant, by Carol L. Douglas
Back before black was banned from the palette, we had shades and tints. Shades are made by adding black to a pure color. Tints are an admixture of white to a pure color. Shades aren’t an effective way to make something darker, but they often make nice new hues.
What we consider acceptable in color-mixing is style-driven, just like everything else. For example, see the Permanent Pigments Practical Color Mixing Guide of 1954, below. It’s all about making shades and tints. That’s a hint about why mid-century paintings looked so grey. A little shading goes a long way.
A mid-century guide to mixing colors.
Today’s exercise is to make a paint chart playing the warm tones on your palette against the cool tones. Both of these examples were done in class by students. My definition of warm vs. cool has shifted over time. Ten years ago, I included quinacridone violet among the cools; last month I had my student stick it in among the warms. That’s because warm-vs.-cool is an arbitrary designation.
The chart in watercolors.

The instructions are a little different for solid-media students than for watercolorists. In either case, start by marking off your paper or canvas with 1” squares, allowing enough room for the cool colors on the left and the warm colors across the top.

Watercolorists (and users of fluid acrylics) just need to mix the colors. Oil painters need to tint their colors with a little bit of white. I’ll get to that below.
In watercolor, the column on the far left should be pure pigments straight from the tube: blues, greens, black, and violets if you want to call them cool. The row across the very top should also be pure pigments, but in the warm tones: reds, oranges and yellows.
The boxes in the middle of the chart are all mixtures. For example, the second-row-second-column box on Sheryl’s chart is black+raw umber. The third-row-second-column box is ultramarine blue+raw umber. The bottom right box is sap green+quinacridone violet, and so on.
The greatest difficulty for watercolor painters is to try and keep the color balance equal. Pigments differ in density, and it’s hard to control dilution. Still, try to use the same amount of each in your mixtures.
Sheryl was doing something my friend Poppy Balser calls “licking the paper.” (That’s partly because she was using a very cheap paper.) That means she was fussing after she put the first brushstroke down. That gave her final chart a mottled appearance. Try to get the mixture down in one brushstroke and leave it.
The chart in oils.
Solid media (oil, gouache, and acrylic) painters have a slightly different assignment. They need to add white to their mixtures. I always add it on the cool side of the chart, by mixing a large clump of the cool-plus-white colors and using that to work across, modulating the warm colors. Working this way, your second-row-second-column box will be (black+white)+raw umber. The third-row-second-column box will be (ultramarine blue+white)+raw umber, and so on.
Note that there is one three-way mixture on the left column. I do not typically paint with a tubed violet, so row five started with a mixed violet to which I added white. If you use a dioxazine purple, it belongs here.
Your last task for this week is to use color temperature, rather than value (lightness or darkness) to define the volume of a sphere, as in Sheryl’s example, below. Her shadows are warm, and her light is cool. Experiment with reversing that as well.
The shape of this sphere isn’t defined with value (lightness or darkness) but with a shift in color temperature. Try it!

This blog post was originally published on November 13, 2017. I’m traveling today.

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Monday Morning Art School: painting the details

It may seem like a fine brush is better, but that’s not true in wet-on-wet painting.

The Halve Maen passing Hudson Highlands, by Carol L. Douglas
One of the things painting teachers repeat over and over is, “use a bigger brush.” Students think they have better control with a smaller brush, but in many cases, the reverse is true. Smaller brushes hold less paint, and they waggle more when we tremble. To draw a juicy line, a brush has to be big enough to hold enough pigment.
It’s relatively easy to lay fine lines down in thin paint, either water-based or when glazing with oils. It’s not so easy in alla prima oil painting. The style tends to be looser and rougher. A fine line added with a rigger can lie on the surface looking silly, or it can melt into the lower layers and look like a grey streak of mush.
Working backwards allows you to make clean edges without being overly fussy.
One solution is to paint edges and lines in the underpainting, and then overlap the color in the top layers to meet the edges. This allows you to create a line that’s razor thin without looking fussy.
Of course, if you’re painting big to small, you don’t have lines or detail in the underpainting. They’re not important in the big-shape phase. You need a technique to remove the excess paint before you draw. For large corrections, I take off excess paint with a palette knife. For lines, I use a wipe-out tool. I had a very old one made by Loew-Cornell that I lost last summer. I replaced it with a Kemper wipe-out tool, and it works perfectly well. These tools are also great for signing wet canvases.
Start by getting rid of excess paint.
You must get rid of excess paint before you can paint your initial shape. You can’t draw into soup. Once you’ve prepared the surface, lay the line in first, before the surrounding background. This sometimes means a line of light-colored paint is laid in before its dark surround. Don’t worry that you’ve broken the dark-to-light rule. This rule is about overall composition, not the final details of a painting.
It’s easier to paint a line with a flat on its side than with a small round.
The side of a flat brush works better than a small round for straight lines. Flats are more stable and tend to track in the right direction. Or, use a palette knife or the edge of a credit card here. Go ahead and use a ruler if you need to, making sure to keep it from dragging the paint.
Your line should be made of fairly thin paint, with just enough medium to carry it smoothly. Too much oil and it will melt into its surround.
Then push the background color right up against the line.
Next paint the surrounding area, pushing up against the line with the background color. Use enough paint and be bold. It’s best to do this edging in a single stroke, but that takes practice. However, as a general rule, the more you touch the surface, the muddier the edges will get.
American Eagle in Dry Dock, by Carol L. Douglas
In my examples, I use two different brushes. The fine flat, made by Rosemary & Co., is very precise, but as with all synthetic fibers, it doesn’t carry much paint. The bright is old and clunkier, but it carries enough paint for a good, finished line. It may seem like finer is better, but that’s actually not true. What’s most important is getting enough paint on the canvas in one pass, evenly, so that your line doesn’t look anemic. With alla prima painting, hog bristles are almost always better.
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Monday Morning Art School: Palette knife painting

If you’ve ever frosted a cake, you know how to use a palette knife.
Fishing village, by Carol L. Douglas
Most of what we artists use on our palettes are what are currently called “painting knives.” A palette knife, in current parlance, is flat like a putty knife. The ones with cranked necks are, according to purists, painting knives.
That’s not a distinction based in practice. Nobody wants to scrape their knuckles either on the palette or on the canvas, so small flexible knives are better for nearly everything. However, you do need a knife with a crook in the neck to paint, and it should be steel and flexible. (You’ll never get any kind of results with a plastic one.)
This demo painting was done on top of an unfinished study I did in the rain in Corea, ME. I never got past the underpainting that day. You can see the original drawing at the top.
Palette knife painting is an impasto technique, meaning it’s best done on top layers. Underpaint in the traditional way, with paint thinned with solvent. Here value is more important than hue. Because you may let certain areas of the underpainting show through, working with analogous colors in the underpainting can be good technique.
Excessive smearing in a palette-knife painting comes from either mixing your paints insufficiently or digging when you apply the paint. Either way, it takes away from the jewel-tone beauty of good palette knife painting. Thoroughly mix your colors before applying them. I add a drop of medium because I don’t want any oxidation in the top layers of my paintings. But limit it, because you can easily make the paint too thin.
Human Ingenuity, by Cynthia Rosen, courtesy of the artist. Note the clean edges and lines Rosen is able to achieve with her knife.
If you’ve ever frosted a cake, you know how to hold the knife. You want new layers of paint to glide over what’s there. A light hand prevents digging. Wipe the knife clean after each color, because it takes very little color to contaminate a stroke.
As with paint brushes, use big knives for big, flat passages and little knives for detail. In general, you’re going to paint using the edge of your knife or by dragging the point.
Palette knives excel at hard edges. They can be added to a brush painting to give less-studied marks to things like power lines, blades of grass, etc.
The Tide Pools, by Cynthia Rosen, courtesy of the artist. Note the pure colors, which were achieved by pre-mixing.
They’re also great for softening the edges where contrasting areas meet. For example, the traps in trees (sky holes) are easily made by floating the sky color across and over the tree-line. This is just a variation of the painting technique called scumbling, where a layer of broken color is added over other colors so that bits of the lower layers of color show through. Palette knives are also tailor-made for sgraffito, which just means scratching through the top paint layers to draw with an incised line.
One of the down-sides of palette-knife painting is the long dry time. You can’t paint over thick paint that’s not thoroughly cured. You’ll need to wait, often a significant amount of time, to rework passages.
This also affects the longevity of your work. If you layer thick paint with no respect to the “fat over lean” rule, it will be prone to cracking. A board is a better substrate, but if a canvas is necessary, you’re best off limiting the amount of paint you apply with a knife.
For those interested in further study of palette knife painting, I recommend Cynthia Rosen. My students’ assignment this week was to study her paintings, here. Note the clarity of her color (achieved by premixing), her incisive linework, and the drawing and composition that undergird her paintings. Everything that matters in brush painting also matters in palette-knife painting.
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Monday Morning Art School: drawing a boat

This exercise is like learning perspective. You’ll never draw this way in the real world, but practicing it will improve your harborside skills.
Cadet, by Carol L. Douglas

I tell my students that it’s best to paint a boat from the deck of another boat or a floating dock. If you can’t, then keep your distance. The tides in Rockport average about 12 feet. That means that if you stand on the public landing painting the lovely and graceful Heron, her angle is going to shift more than 20° over six hours. That’s an impossible perspective shift to manage.

There aren’t tides on lakes, obviously, but the waterline-view of a boat is still often the loveliest view.
Two figure eights. The top one is going to be stern-facing; the bottom one is going to be bow-facing. Thus the lines on the right are straight for the sides of the transom, curved for the bow. I made the bow loop slightly bigger because in practice the bow is likely to be higher.
I learned to draw boats based on figure eights. This is simple. You can master it in the studio before you go out to tackle the real thing. Since the bow of a boat is generally higher than the stern, I draw that end of the figure eight higher. The figure mustn’t be two circles, but you can make it as short or long as you wish. There’s no reason the two loops must be equal, although you should try it that way first. It’s easiest to do this when you’re not trying to be overly precise.
The fattest points of your figure eight are going to be the stern and bow of your boat. The keel curves in the front, so that line is drawn as a curve. The stern may curve in a fantail or be a flat transom. That varies by the boat.
The next step is to erase the extra lines and add a little shading. I took the liberty of adding a little extra height to the bow on the bottom.
In the top example, I put the transom forward; in the bottom drawing I put the bow forward. The important thing to realize is that the figure-eight is just like an optical illusion: it can go either way. Once I draw the curve or cut off the transom, I just erase the extra lines and gussy it up with some shadows. 
In the very old days, small boats were sometimes clinker-built, meaning they had overlapping planks that made for beautiful curving lines beloved of artists. If you see those planks on a modern boat, they’re molded. I halfheartedly faked them in on my drawing, because I no longer entirely believe in them.
The actual direction of the boat is like an optical illusion; it can flip either way. The Scrumpy’s notch is a little crooked; sorry.
Drawing boats like this is like drawing perspective. You need to know how to draw 2-point perspective but you’ll never really draw those rays on your canvas while you’re working. It’s an exercise that teaches you a principle that you then incorporate into your work.
Dinghy, by Carol L. Douglas, shows how fast that can be done in practice. This was a workshop demo.
The same with this kind of boat drawing. The take-away lesson is this: as long as you have the relative heights of the pieces of your boat right, it can swing on its anchor all afternoon without significantly messing up your painting. Block it in with initial measurements and let it go from there. The parts will stretch out or grow shorter, but their heights will always remain the same. 
Once you see it as a process of squeezing and lengthening the horizontal shapes while leaving the heights the same, drawing moving boats is easy.
That liberates you from worrying when your boat—as it will—wanders around its mooring. I did the little sketch above to demonstrate that.
This was first published on February 12, 2018, but some things bear repeating.
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Monday Morning Art School: stop flailing

An efficient plan for fast outdoor painting in oils.
Camden harbor, by Carol L. Douglas

Sometimes people ask me how we manage to get so many paintings done during an event. We avoid what my friend Brad Marshall called “flailing around.” That means those times when you seem to lose your way. We’ve all done it, when apparently everything we know falls out the bottom of our mind. I’ve written a simple protocol to avoid this. If you always work in this order, you’re less likely to flail around.

1. Set up your palette with all colors out, organized in a rainbow pattern; may be done before going out.
Putting your pigments in the same spots each time speeds up your process. And putting out all of them when you start ensures that you develop the painting based on what you see, rather than on what’s at hand.
Beach saplings, by Carol L. Douglas
2. Value drawing of the scene in question, in your sketchbook.
If you do this on your canvas and then paint over it, you won’t have it to refer back to when the light changes or you need to restate your darks.
3. Crop drawing, identify and strengthen big shapes.
If you start by filling in a little box, you only allow yourself one way to look at the composition. Instead, draw what interests you first, and then contemplate how it might best be boxed into a painting.

Parrsboro sunrise, by Carol L. Douglas
4. Transfer drawing to canvas with paint as a monochromatic grisaille.
This allows you to draw with a brush and check your composition’s values.
5. Underpaint big shapes making sure value, chroma and hue are correct. Thin with OMS.
This underlayer should be thin, but not soupy, so it can accept top layers without making mud. You don’t want a lot of oil in this layer as it can lead to cracking in the future.

Eastport harbor, by Carol L. Douglas
6. Second layer: divide big shapes and develop details. A slightly thicker layer.
This is the body of your painting, without a lot of detail. Almost pure paint without either medium or heavy impasto. Note: for some painters, this is combined with the last layer.
7. Third and last layer: use medium and more paint, adding highlights and impasto.
This is the final layer, the one with painterly flourishes. Controlled use of medium here results in an even, bright, tough final surface.
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Monday Morning Art School: Mark Making

Mark-making can be loose and gestural or very controlled. It’s personal, but it’s also something you can learn.
Dining Room in the Country, 1913, Pierre Bonnard, courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Art. Bonnard used small brush strokes, intense colors, and close values.
When I was a student, I often left heavy edges in my paintings. A teacher told me, “That’s your style.” Well, it wasn’t; I’d just never learned to marry edges. It was a deficiency.
Our marks are our handwriting. I’d rather see them develop naturally, so I generally avoid teaching much mark-making. But sometimes students fall into traps that severely limit their development. It’s better to understand all the ways your brush works and then settle down into something that reflects your character, rather than have to break bad brushwork down the road.
Self Portrait with Beret and Turned Up Collar, 1659, Rembrandt van Rijn, courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Pay close attention to the economy of the brushwork in the hair, and the expressive, unfinished brushwork in the face. In this way, Rembrandt was able to create a powerful focus.
Let’s first talk about how not to do it:
  • Unless you’re doing close detail, don’t hold your brush like a pencil. It’s a baton, and holding it to the back of the center-point gives you more lyrical motion.
  • Don’t dab. This means a pouncing/stabbing motion with the tip of your brush. It’s amateurish in oils, anemic in acrylics, and only possible with any elegance with a wet watercolor brush.
  • Don’t use brush strokes that go in all one direction. Learn to apply paint in the round.
All these rules are successfully broken by great artists. You may go on to break them yourself, but it behooves you to learn the full range of motion of your brush before you do so.
Wheatfield with Crows, 1890, Vincent van Gogh, courtesy Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The motion in the painting is created by his brush strokes.
Mark-making can be loose and gestural or very controlled. It’s not just pertinent to painting; it applies to any material applied to a surface, including three-dimensional and digital art. It’s purely personal, and can be where the artist expresses—or suppresses—his feelings about the subject.
Waterlilies, c. 1915, Claude Monet, courtesy Neue Pinakothek, Munich. Monet makes no attempt to hide his drawing in this painting. The brushstrokes are wet-over-dry.
Mark-making is an important aspect of abstract art, including the kind where the mark-making is not done with a brush (as with Jackson Pollack or Gerhard Richter). But tight brushwork is just as much a hallmark of modern painting—see pop art, for example.
Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892, John Singer Sargent, courtesy Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh. Note that the transparent sleeves are not produced by glazing, but with direct, long brushstrokes.
I’ve included five great artworks in this assignment. Each has one or more close-ups with it. Your assignment is to try to figure out the brush used and copy the brush-strokes as accurately as you can on an old canvas. Note that I’m not asking you to make a painting; that would be too confusing. I’m just asking you to try to mimic the brushwork.