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Monday Morning Art School: Subject vs. focal point

The People’s Census at Bethlehem, 1566, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, courtesy Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

The number one question you must ask about your painting is: is it boring? If your painting is boring, nobody is going to engage with it.

One way to do keep things interesting is to manipulate where you put the subject of your painting. You don’t need to plop the subject in the center of your canvas and the subject does not necessarily have to be the focal point.

Consider Pieter Brueghel the Elder‘s masterpiece, The Census of Bethlehem, above. It’s unlikely that Brueghel consulted a text about composition, because those things didn’t exist back in the 16th century. He came up with this visual trick on his own and used it over and over.

The Procession to Calvary, 1564, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum. This is a veritable “Where’s Waldo” of a painting.

The subject is not in the middle of the canvas. Nor is it the focal point. In fact, the subject will only be clear to you if you know the Bible story about Mary and Joseph traveling to be counted in Bethlehem. Because of the overall energy of the canvas, you’re engaged enough to hunt for them, and to realize that Mary and Joseph are at the very bottom of the canvas, heading towards the census-taker at the bottom left.

That’s different from the focal points, which are within the swirl of activity that made up the daily life of a medieval village.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558, either Pieter Brueghel the Elder or a close copy thereafter, courtesy Royal Museums of Fine Arts

Brueghel often made the subjects of his painting seem like almost an afterthought to the big scene. Another great example of this is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, about which William Carlos Williams wrote:

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning.

In that short poem, Williams says everything about Brueghel’s compositional technique.

The Peasant Wedding, 1566-69, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum. Brueghel also painted many genre paintings, meant to illustrate a known story or moral argument.

So, what’s the difference?

The focal point is a visual engagement, whereas the subject is what the painting is about. The subject of a painting can be a story or fable, as were Brueghel’s paintings. It can be an object or person. Or, in the case of abstraction, it can be nothing at all.

Focal points are something quite different. They are the points that your eye rests on at it moves through a painting.

What draws the human eye to a specific passage in a painting?

  • Contrast in value, hue and chroma, with value being the biggest driver of the three. If you have a dark shape next to a light shape, the eye tends to look at that place.
  • Detail. Assuming the whole painting is not overloaded with detail, if there’s a lot of detail in a passage, that is where the eye will go first.
  • Line. Lines within the composition act like arrows, drawing your eye to the focal points.

Is there just one focal point in the painting?

I sure hope not, because your job as the composer is to get the human eye to dance its way through the composition, to engage the viewer for as long as you can keep them interested. The longer they spend looking at your picture, the more involved they become with it.

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Exercise and the artist

Bracken Fern, 12X9, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping in the continental US

Once upon a time, I was a serious runner. I got up extremely early to get in my miles before packing the kids off to school and heading to my studio. My kids remember that I always touted the value of exercise. They claim that I once told them: “if your head was cut off, it would grow back because you were a runner.” They are, of course, full of malarkey, but I certainly believed that running had healing properties.

Then at age 40 I had a miserable bout with cancer. My fitness stood me in great stead, but a year of chemo, radiation and surgery put paid to my running forever. Instead, I started to walk miles every day. Among my happiest memories are the hours my pal Mary and I walked in our suburban neighborhood, working through the issues of our lives.

Mountain Path (the susseration of dried leaves), 11X14, oil on archival canvasboard, $1087 framed, includes shipping in continental US

It turns out that I have a cancer gene. It reappeared in a different form several years later. As with the first time, I had barely recovered from the anesthesia before I was struggling back into my sneakers. But repeated insults to your body take their toll.

My friend Jane, who’s going through a terrible health problem, told me, “I keep wondering if I’ll ever have a stretch of time to regain strength.”

I’ve been there, sister. It takes longer than you hope, but if you persevere, you’ll recover.

We’ve had a stretch of miserable weather here in the northeast. I gauge its impact by the number of people I see along the trail. Recently, it’s been as empty as it was in the dead of winter. Rain, fog, cold, and more rain are disheartening in the pre-dawn hours. The urge to go back to sleep is almost overwhelming.

Yet I don’t. Part of that is habit, and part of that is fear. My aunt, two of my uncles and my grandfather were all dead of heart attacks before they reached my age.

Blueberry barrens, Clary Hill, oil on canvas, 24X36, $3985 framed includes shipping in continental US

Exercise can reverse physical decline

Last week I wrote about reversing cognitive decline by learning a new skill like drawing. The corollary to that is that you can reverse physical decline with regular exercise. Many studies bear that out. It’s not that exercise is a miracle cure; it’s that our sedentary lifestyle ages us before our time.

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when the effects of modernity were just beginning to be felt, physician William Buchan wrote, “Of all the causes which conspire to render the life of a man short and miserable, none have greater influence than the want of proper exercise.”

Mountain Fog, 11X14, $1087, includes shipping in continental US

Most of us have no idea how sedentary we are compared to how we were designed, because our whole world has been one of inactivity, generation after generation. We artists spend hours in front of our easels; that’s really no better than spending them in front of a computer.

There’s another good reason to spend time hiking or walking, and that is how it changes your perception of nature and landscape. If you only look at a place from the window of your car, you’re seeing only a fraction of it. This week, I’m watching the ferns slowly unfurl. I know where they are because I walk these same woods every day. Later today, if the skies clear, I’ll go paint near them. I probably won’t paint the ferns themselves, but I will paint the green blush that is starting to-finally!-overtake my world.

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Why I don’t buy Bob Ross merchandise

Bob Ross Toaster
Image courtesy Amazon.

Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting first appeared on PBS when I was 24 years old. At one time, his show was PBS’ most popular offering ever, but that was lost on me. We didn’t own a television set during the eleven years he broadcasted.

That is not to say that I didn’t recognize his gentle voice, his fabulous perm, or his Happy Little Trees. The mesmerizing dullness of his show was wildly popular among my stoner friends. I had a Bob Ross contact high, understanding his cultural significance without watching the show.

Bob Ross Happy Little Tree mints
Image courtesy Amazon.

Ross can be forgiven for making 20th century sofa art. His art was secondary to his career in the Air Force, where he rose to the rank of Master Sergeant. He took classes at the Anchorage, Alaska USO at a time when Abstraction reigned. His teachers wanted nothing to do with representational painting. “They’d tell you what makes a tree, but they wouldn’t tell you how to paint a tree,” he recollected. I felt his pain; I was learning to paint at the same time.

After the Air Force, Ross worked for Bill Alexander, a PBS and workshop teacher who claimed to have invented wet-on-wet painting. Through this, Ross met Annette and Walt Kowalski. They were his ardent fans, friends and supporters. They were instrumental in creating both the PBS series and Bob Ross Inc., which sold painting supplies and instructional videos.

Bob Ross slow cooker
Image courtesy Amazon.

The company became wholly-owned by the Kowalskis upon Ross’ untimely death from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He had already signed over his rights to his name and likeness to the firm, a move his son Steve said he regretted and was trying to reverse. The company continues to this day, run by the Kowalskis’ daughter, Joan. She is responsible for the unending stream of Bob Ross dreck on the internet.

Some of it is cute, some is funny, and occasionally someone buys me some of it. I thank them, of course, but Ross’ family didn’t see a penny from the bobble heads, socks and mint tins I’ve been given.

Who’s entitled to that money?

In his will, Ross left the rights to his name and likeness to his son Steve and his half-brother Jimmie Cox. The Kowalskis claimed that Ross’ life work was wholly owned by them, and they prevailed in court. The millions of dollars earned from Bob Ross’ likeness have benefitted the Kowalskis, not Ross’ family.

The Kowalskis maintain that they deserve it. “If not for the efforts of the remaining founders and their dedication to this mission, Bob’s artistic and cultural relevance-and his expressed desire to become the world’s most beloved painting teacher and friend-would have been lost decades ago with his passing,” they wrote.

Is that any more honest than the claim that Bill Alexander invented alla prima painting? Having been around during Ross’ first flush of popularity, I think not.

Bob Ross action figure
Image courtesy Amazon.

Bob Ross’ enduring appeal lies in his character. If he gave the art world nothing else, saying “We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents,” is reason enough to remember him.

Theirs isn’t the first or last business partnership that has foundered over money. Mercifully, it doesn’t really tarnish Ross’ reputation, which is as a fine person, not as an artist. But as for me and my house, we will never buy Bob Ross merchandise.

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Monday Morning Art School: what’s the point of a three-hour painting?

Early Spring on Beech Hill, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas, 12X16, $1449 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Near the wonderful, loose Andrew Wyeth watercolors at the Farnsworth Art Museum is a small room dedicated to his painting practice. You are surrounded by his careful investigation of details, compositional sketches, and studies. “When I was painting Christina’s World I would sit there by the hours working on the grass, and I began to feel I was really out in the field. I got lost in the texture of the thing. I remember going down into the field and grabbing up a section of earth and setting it on the base of my easel. It wasn’t a painting I was working on. I was actually working on the ground itself,” he said.

Edward Hopper, who mined similar veins of alienation as Wyeth, was known for meticulously storyboarding his major paintings. He drew thousands of preparatory sketches. A comparison of one of his final sketches for Nighthawks with the final painting shows just how important his drawings were in cutting things down to the bone. He used drawing to shake off the burden of representational reality.

Failed attempt #1 at Chauncey Ryder trees. I’ll go back up the hill and try this again if it ever dries out. Dialing back the chroma will help.

Modern plein air painting

On the flip side, there’s contemporary plein air painting, dashed off in alla prima technique in a matter of a few hours. I love plein air painting myself, but a recent conversation with a student had me wondering about its lasting value. She is frustrated with her local painting group, which never works more than two or three hours. “What’s the point of rushing like that?” she asked me.

There are hundreds of plein air events in the United States every year, each of which has around thirty juried artists, each of whom in turn produces 5-10 works per event. That means the art market is flooded with tens of thousands of paintings from these events alone. Not all of them are good. I’ve produced more than my share of duds.

These events create a commodity that’s affordable to a middle-class audience. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; it’s what drove the Dutch Golden Age of Painting, which gave us Vermeer, Frans Hals and Rembrandt.

Failed attempt #2 at Chauncey Ryder trees. Boring composition and I made a messed up stew of the buds on the branches.

But it’s equally true that mass movements give us our share of dreck. The paintings done at plein air events are often safe (read ‘boring’) and dashed off without a lot of thought. That’s because plein air events are a production grind.

Loose brushwork has become the norm of plein air painting. But there’s no law that says that plein air must be quick, or that loose brushwork is the apotheosis of outdoor painting. These are just tropes of our times. Leaning into them too heavily just makes you a copier of other people’s ideas.

This start I like. Luckily, it’s steps from my house, so I can revisit it the next time there’s a break in the rain.

Go outside and take your time

This spring in the northeast is miserably cold and wet. I’ve painted outdoors just twice. Out of the three things I did, the one I like is the least-finished (above). In the other two, I was tinkering, trying to feather trees like Chauncey Ryder. Everything else in my paintings suffered. I don’t care; I’ll wipe out the boards and try again.

I have my eye on another stand of trees, small spruces. I want to see if I can mimic the soft brushwork of Anders Zorn in them, since to me he’s the only person who ever painted baby evergreens convincingly.

“You’re going to confuse yourself with all this mimicry!” Eric Jacobsen chided me. Well, no, because I don’t really want to paint like Ryder or Zorn. I want to figure out how they did this specific soft-focus thing on trees. I could never do this if I was still rushing around churning out three-hour paintings at events. The cost of failure is too great.

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Cadaver tombs and skull watches

Cadaver monument of John FitzAlan, 7th Earl of Arundel, c 1435, courtesy Fitzalan Chapel, Arundel Castle, Sussex

I grew up with the 11th Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which is why I’m conversant with the careers of Gladstone and Disraeli (they fought a lot) and not so hot on quantum mechanics. As fun as it was to follow rabbit trails across the Encyclopædia‘s 28,150 pages, Wikipedia is faster and easier, and better-indexed, too.

That’s how I came across the cadaver monument, which is a type of effigy tomb featuring a decomposing body. In the best of these, the deceased is freshly laid out on a bier and we can ‘see’ his decomposing corpse beneath. Death was a significant part of life right up to modern times, but the cadaver monument was characteristic of the late Middle Ages, when the Black Death kept sic transit gloria mundi on everyone’s lips.

These monuments are a form of memento mori, meant to remind us that life is transient and all earthly striving is vanity. Of course, the people with cadaver monuments were those whom earthly striving had rewarded well, including Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, whose tomb reads:

“Stand, seeing in me, who is eaten by worms, what you will be. I, who was once young and beautiful to look on… lie under thick clods. Worldly pomp, honour, recognition, what heights there are, what they, pray, if not dreams, folly? …All things are put to flight by cruel death, like shadows…”

Alice de la Pole’s tomb, details from en-vie (left) and en-transi (right), Church of St Mary, c. 1475, courtesy St Mary’s Church, Ewelme.

Pray your loved ones out of Purgatory

By the late Middle Ages, Purgatory had become an established part of Catholic theology. Praying for the dead was practical, as it could effectively reduce their time and suffering in purgation. Cadaver monuments reminded the living to pray for the dead, along with powerfully suggesting that they knock off their own sinning.

The en-vie (in life) figure, on top, was a status symbol. He was dressed in his swishest best. It’s the en-transi (in transit) effigy in conjunction with the en-vie figure that makes the cadaver tomb so powerful – that and the sculptors’ obvious familiarity with death and decomposition.

Upper section of the Transi de René de Chalon, c. 1545-47, Ligier Richier, the church of Saint-Étienne at Bar-le-Duc, France.

Isolated en-transi sculptures are more typical, although none of them are common – there are only 44 extant cadaver monuments of any kind in Britain. The British examples are more restrained than their continental counterparts, which sometimes include the vermin that speed corpses into decomposition. Perhaps the greatest of these is the Cadaver Tomb of René of Chalon, by Ligier Richier. Legend says that the putrefied figure originally clutched René of Chalon‘s actual withered heart in its raised right hand.

Alice de la Pole, the grand-daughter of Geoffrey Chaucer, is the only British woman with a cadaver monument. Wealthy and powerful in her own right, she chose to be shown as an emaciated old lady. Her eyes are half-open, the better to see the saints above.

Death’s Head watches

Engraving of a skull-shaped memento mori watch associated with Mary Queen of Scots, engraved with figures of Death and Adam and Eve, c. 1820-35, Charles John Smith engraver, courtesy British Museum

Then there’s the phenomenon of the Death’s Head pocket watch, which continues to this day, albeit in a stylized form. These are memento mori lite, as they reached their vogue in the 17th and 18th centuries, the so-called Age of Reason. The cases were engraved with images of Adam and Eve, Death with his sickle, and other morbid themes. The watch was viewed by opening the skull’s jaw.

It’s rumored that Mary, Queen of Scots had one. That’s a possibility, since pocket watches were an innovation of the 16th century. According to legend, it was given to her favorite lady-in-waiting upon Mary’s execution. If it ever really existed, it’s long vanished.

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Reverse aging by learning to draw

Stuffed animal in a bowl, with Saran Wrap. 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

For decades, I’ve been telling my husband: “When they come to take me away, tell them I never could remember anything.” It’s true; I have a terrible memory for names and dates. I’ve watched a loved one take a digit-span test and shuddered; I couldn’t recite a string of numbers backwards at age 25, let alone now.

Recently I’ve noticed my short-term memory is improving. I’ve attributed that to the infernal modern need for passwords, which we need to unlock everything from our bank accounts to our house.

We take for granted that older people lose cognitive ability – especially memory – over time. But what if that is preventable, or even reversible? That would be tremendous not only for the people involved, but for our aging society.

Pull up your Big Girl Panties, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

I’ve got good news for you

Recent research suggests that not only can cognitive loss be delayed, but in some cases even reversed. Researchers had elderly (55+) participants engage in intensive learning for three months in a program designed to mimic the schooling we put our kids through. Not only was there cognitive improvement, it lasted through the one-year follow-up test.

This wasn’t a casual learning program. Study participants took twelve weeks of classes in three subjects about which they had no prior knowledge, choosing from Spanish, photography, iPad operation, drawing, and music composition. They had homework (hah!). That and their attendance were tracked.

Both the six-month and one-year scores were significantly higher than the subjects’ pretest scores. The researchers were careful to note that they’d tried to replicate the environment in which young people learn, so the social bonds created in classes could have been as important as the learning itself.

This wasn’t a lone study, either; they were duplicating the results of earlier research.

Back It Up, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

A half-hearted approach won’t work

What’s equally important is what doesn’t promote cognitive improvement. Just listening to classical music doesn’t cut it-you must pick up that cello and try to master it. There’s no duffing it to mental acuity. You must focus, intently, on a new skill for it to make a difference.

Most painting students are older adults. The ones who stick with it are the ones who are slightly obsessed. They don’t just paint during class; they work tirelessly during the week. Most of my students stick with me over long periods of time, and build an esprit de corps among themselves. Perhaps their peer-to-peer learning and encouragement are as essential to their success as artists as anything I tell them.

Hiking, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

It seems that any skill that requires long-term effort and concentration will help the older mind, and drawing and painting certainly qualify. The beautiful-and maddening-thing about painting is that it’s not ever really mastered. I’ve been at it for decades and there’s still always something to learn.

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Monday Morning Art School: activate your paints

Clary Hill Blueberry Barrens, watercolor full sheet, $3985 framed includes shipping in continental US.

I give new students a protocol sheet. On one side it lists the steps for a good oil painting, on the other side, the steps for a good watercolor. (Acrylic painters can follow the oil painters’ lead.) Then I tell them they no longer need me, and laugh.

Last year, I realized that there was a step missing on the watercolor side, a step that seemed so basic that I had failed to include it. It was to wet the paints on the palette before starting painting. I expected that everyone knew that. Silly me, because it’s critical for clean, bright color.

The deck of the schooner American Eagle, from which I teach watercolor twice a year. 8X5.5 sketch.

Watercolor can be purchased in pans or tubes. If the latter (which I far prefer), it’s generally squeezed into a palette and allowed to dry. (There are a few painters out there who squeeze out new watercolors every time they work; that’s an expensive and unnecessary practice.) In either case, the paint needs to be activated. That means wetting it down to approximate its consistency out of the tube.

The easiest way to do this is with a small spray bottle; you can also use a syringe or drop (clean) water from a brush. It should be done 10-15 minutes before you start painting, and might need to be redone as you work, depending on environmental conditions.

Before activating your paints, make sure they’re clean. Any color that’s migrated into another pan is best removed when the underlying color is dry. You can do this very easily with a damp brush. And if you didn’t clean your mixing wells earlier, this is a good time to do it.

Penobscot Bay sunset, from the deck of the same schooner. 8X5.5 sketch.

How wet should your paints be? Wetter than you might imagine. You need to lay a solid film of water over the top of the paints and let it soak down into the pigments. That takes more than a few seconds. If you go several days between painting sessions, expect it to take at least fifteen minutes.

Most of my watercolors are dashed off between oil paintings, but they still need activated paint. 8X5.5 sketch.

The proof is in the pudding

My old pal, watercolorist Stu Chait paints deep, intense hues in his abstract paintings. He gets them by working with suspensions of paint in little square cups. Bruce McMillan, master of clean color, paints on a big butcher’s tray with paint cups around the center.

The best way to achieve a prissy, old-lady look in watercolor is to start with dry paints. Even a wet brush can’t pick up enough pigment to give saturated color. To compensate, the artist starts to glaze colors, over and over. Eventually he has something so delicate, so refined, so dull, that it looks like it was done by a minor British noble’s maiden aunt.

Watercolor is shockingly durable. I have a palette given to me by a retired artist. It contains the paints she used back in art school in the 1970s. They awaken with a sheer misting of water. This is one reason for the perpetual love affair of painters with watercolors-they’re patient. You can slip them in a backpack and ignore them for months between uses.

Rocks along the Pecos River. How I miss teaching in New Mexico!

One more thing

There are a few slots open in my critique class, starting tonight.

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Escape from Pleasantville

Mary Day on Camden Harbor, Cassie Sano, courtesy of the artist.

“I’ve escaped from Pleasantville,” Cassie Sano excitedly told our zoom class. “I’ve always been afraid to step out of Pleasantville, but now I’m exploring outside of it.

Later, I asked her about this transformation. “It’s not that my paintings were awful. I was just painting too tightly and too carefully with no detail left undefined,” she said. “They were pleasant, but somewhat boring. Afraid to step ‘out of bounds,’ my paintings reminded me of the movie Pleasantville, and I began to jokingly refer to them with that name.”

That’s a 1998 comedy about two siblings trapped in a 1950s sitcom, set in a small town populated by ‘perfect’ people.

Shadows and Tracks, Mount Vernon, Cassie Sano, courtesy of the artist.

“I left nothing to the imagination of the viewer. I wanted to get the heck out of Pleasantville, but I didn’t know how.”

Cassie is somewhat handicapped in that goal by being one of the most pleasant people I know. Behind her gentle demeanor, however, is a fiercely-fit single-mother and grandmother; she once bounded up Bald Mountain to keep me company while I was painting. And then bounded around the summit to keep herself amused.

She studied graphic design at Salem State University, Elementary Education at Boston College, and cartography and journalism in the military. “In 2018, I retired as a mail carrier for the US Postal Service, and then began focusing on my art. I spent a few years doing pottery, but then shifted to watercolor and oil painting, writing and illustrating picture books, and teaching watercolor painting to beginners.”

“When I first started painting with oils, I was focused on the technical aspects of painting– how to set up my palette, when to use Turpenoid or medium, how to apply the paint on the canvas, and effective use of values and composition. As I became more comfortable with these technical matters, I began to think beyond them.”

Corea Harbor, Cassie Sano, courtesy of the artist.

Transformation from journeyman to master

That makes sense; we must figure out technique before we can dig into meaning and expression. But at some point, technique becomes automatic and we start thinking about deeper issues.

Cassie’s most recent class with me was on bravura brushwork, and that seemed to be what she needed to get past literalism-especially the class where I asked her to paint like Vincent van Gogh. “I could feel myself loosening up and finally seeing how to sneak past Border Patrol… I felt a lot of joy after that class and shouted (to myself), ‘I finally get it!'”

“My goal is to continue practicing these techniques with an emphasis on making my paintings more exciting and joyful for the viewers, and leaving a lot to their imagination,” she told me.

Vienna Mountain Road, Cassie Sano, courtesy of the artist.

Cassie is represented by Eye Feast Art. She is a member of the Kennebec Valley Art Association, River Arts Gallery, and Maine Arts Gallery, and the organizer for the Kennebec Valley Plein Air Painters. In June, she will have a solo show at McLaughlin Garden and Homestead, 97 Main Street, South Paris, ME. The opening will be June 3 from 2-4 PM.

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The value of value

Cypresses and Sunlight, 11X14, Carol L. Douglas, $1087 includes shipping in continental US.

Early this year, I set out to create a seven-step online training class to teaching the fundamentals of oil painting. This morning I’m releasing Step 2: the Value Drawing. Making these interactive classes is a tremendous learning experience for me, and I hope the net result is helpful for you, too.

Value (lightness to darkness) is just one component of color, but it’s the most important. Establishing a hierarchy of values before you ever pick up a brush will save you hours of flailing around in the field. I know this from personal experience. Before I became disciplined about value, I wasted tons of time (and much paint) dithering, repainting, and generally making a mess of more paintings than I saved.

The value sketch is the oil painter’s secret weapon. It’s an opportunity to plan your painting before you ever pick up a brush. And it’s critical; if the value structure is compelling, your painting will be compelling. If not, your painting is doomed from the start. Nothing in painting is more important than value.

Birches, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

Value is the basis of good composition

“But why waste time on a sketch when I can just paint?” you ask. For the same reason that contractors need blueprints before they start building: great ideas require planning.

Investigating value in advance is the key to compositional fluency. In value sketches, we quickly experiment with different arrangements of lights and darks. This helps us make intelligent choices about focal points, line, and the weight of individual elements in the painting.

By breaking complex scenes down into restricted value planes, we create blueprints for our paintings. This not only helps us simplify ideas, it guides us through later decisions about color, texture, and detail.

Value sketching starts with just a few simple, inexpensive tools: a sketchbook and a mechanical pencil. Working in a sketchbook is a lot faster and easier than working out questions of light and dark in paint. In return for a small investment of time at the beginning of your painting, you’ll reap tremendous dividends as you go forward.

Dropping Tide, 11X14, oil on archival canvasboard, $1087 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Amplifying contrast

Value drawing helps us simplify and amplify (when necessary) the contrast between darks and lights in our composition. Contrast is the visual tool that creates interest and drama in a painting. Too many paintings fail because they’re stuck in the boring midtones.

Seafoam, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Understanding Form

Value drawing helps us understand how light interacts with different forms and objects in a composition. It’s what gives objects volume. You may never paint the nuances of three-dimensional modeling, but you should understand them.

Value is particularly important in realism. It’s how we create convincing illusions of light and shadow, depth and dimensionality.

Who is this course designed for?

It’s comprehensive, so it’s tailored to both a beginner’s understanding and an experienced artist’s continued development. You can go back to it repeatedly and take it at your own speed, so you’ll benefit from it no matter what your starting point.

Step 1: the Perfect Palette

Step 2: the Value Drawing

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Monday Morning Art School: avoid muddy colors

Early spring in Maine, oil on canvasboard, by Carol L. Douglas

Does your oil paint look bright on the palette, but turn muddy or grey on the canvas? Do you have trouble keeping colors clean? You’re using too much solvent and/or medium. It’s an easy problem to fix, once you’ve learned the correct technique.

Why fat-over-lean?

Fat-over-lean prevents sinking color and cracking paint emulsion. The first is that dullish grey film that develops over paint that’s overthinned with solvent. Cracking paint doesn’t usually appear until after the artist is dead but is a major issue in some masterpieces.

Some manufacturers of alkyd mediums argue that the fat-over-lean rule no longer applies. Take this with a grain of salt. It takes time for problems to appear in paintings, time that’s measured in decades, not years.

Perfect layering demonstrated by Laura Felina at my recent workshop in Sedona.

Simple concept, tricky application

By ‘fat’ we mean the medium-either commercially-mixed mediums or drying oils like linseed, poppy or walnut. The paint itself contains medium as a binder, usually in the form of linseed oil. By ‘lean’ we mean a solvent, usually odorless mineral spirits (OMS).

OMS evaporates, so its dry-time is dependent on temperature and humidity. Drying oils don’t evaporate, they oxidize. That means they stay there, bonding with oxygen, creating a new chemical structure on the surface of the paint. This combination can be extremely durable.

In plein air, this process is usually cut back to two or three steps: an underpainting cut with OMS, a layer that’s pure paint, and then possibly a detail layer cut with medium on the top. However, in more complex paintings with more layers, the shift from lean to fat can be more gradual.

This is a properly-dry start to a painting.

The underpainting

The underpainting or grisaille should be thinned sparingly, and only with solvent (OMS). Keep it dry enough that it’s not shiny. How can you tell? Stick a finger in your paint. If you can slide the paint around, it’s too sloppy. If your finger looks like you were just fingerprinted, it’s too sloppy. You should be able to see just a bare hint of color on your fingertip.

If you put too much solvent in the bottom layer, you’ll get muddy, mushy color as you try to build. No, you don’t need to wait for it to dry. Take a paper towel and lay it carefully on the surface of your painting. Use your hand to apply pressure. You’re blotting-not wiping-the excess moisture away. It should be almost dry to the touch before you proceed.

It’s best to avoid blotting. Learn to use only fractional amounts of solvent, just enough to allow the paint to move without dragging. Use a rag to lift paint from light passages, instead of using excess solvent to thin these passages.

If it’s shiny, there’s too much solvent in the bottom layer. The subsequent layers will be soft and muddy.

The middle layer (which is also sometimes the last layer)

This next layer should be as close to pure paint as possible. If your paint is too stodgy to move freely, check to be sure that you aren’t using clotted, hardening paint. Or, your brushes may be too soft for alla prima painting, which works best with hog bristles. If you must thin your paint, a drop of oil is all that’s appropriate in this layer.

The top layers may need no medium at all. Many painters don’t use it. Blueberry barrents, by me, early spring.

Top layer or detailing

Here you can use medium or linseed oil. But if you use more than a dollop the size of a mechanical pencil’s eraser in an 8X10 painting, you’re overdoing it. Using too much medium will result in soft, lost lines and mediocre brushwork.

Medium is helpful for laying detail down over wet paint, but don’t develop an overreliance on it. Many artists use none at all.

There’s room in my upcoming critique class. It’s a great way to bring your painting to the next level. Open to intermediate painters in all media.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025: