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This is the first in a series of posts concerning the mental process your brain should be taking in making a great painting.  Every piece will go through these stages and depending upon how well they are executed will result in the quality of the painting.  I’m going to skip over “Concept”, which is actually the first stage.  I’m assuming you know what you what to paint.  If now, then step one is as follows…decide what you’re going to paint.  After you’ve got your initial idea it time to figure out your most basic layout or your compositions.

Composition is simply the arrangement of shapes and values on your picture plane.

You want to aim for a combination of shapes, angles, lights and darks that is pleasing to the eye.  Well, what is pleasing to the eye you ask.  The eye likes what the brain likes and your brain likes to put things in some type of order.   It wants to take the chaos and arrange it into things that it understands.  It wants to group like shapes or sizes.  It wants to clean up a mess.  Don’t go overboard.

Aim for “Unity with Diversity”.

Most student will remember this phrase from art school.  The last thing I want you to do you to line up all your shapes from smallest to largest and call it a day.  That is the extreme that your brain is trying to do but if we travel all the way down this road will sacrifice all diversity and thus all the visual interest.  See, even though your brain is trying to put object in order it will get bored after it’s done and you don’t want boring painting.  The objective is to find that balance between unifying your composition but keep the diversity or visual interest.

One of the easiest ways to start this process is experiment or decide based on your subject matter what your dominant value will be.  Paintings should always have a dominant value.  It should be mostly dark, mostly light, or mostly a middle value.  This creates that unity by connecting large portions of your picture with one value.  Ohhh, your brain likey!  Here are some examples below.

Fig. 1 has a dominant dark value has has a number of shapes arranged or grouped in a pleasing fashion.  Fig. 2 on the other hand is weak and needs to make a decision.  In this instant as well as all you do in art, be CONFIDENT!  MAKE A DECISION!  Push your shapes and values to get a pleasing composition and then decide on your dominant value.  If you get this stage right you can make a slew of mistakes throughout the rest of the process and still end up with an impressive painting.  Nothing makes a great painting like a strong foundation and inversely nothing is worse than a weak one.

Color Intensity!

I used to watch a fantastic artist named Brian Stelfreeze every year at the Heroes comic convention doing a painting for the annual Heroes auction.  Many times I’d notice how he would create a hot spot of the most vibrant, intense color that would just leaped off of his painting.  How does he get that color to sing I’d ask myself?  Years later through study and painting daily myself it became apparent.

Let’s define a few things first.  The full intensity or color saturation is the purest the color can be.  It isn’t muted in any way by the addition or white or black.  Think of it as a color to it’s most extreme degree.

An artist can use it to draw the viewer eye to a certain area of the page or make that color literally look like it’s glowing.  Below I’ve sketched the face of a girl with red hair where in I’ve placed a yellow highlight.  I really wanted that highlight to look like it’s glowing.  When a pure bright color is placed or surrounded by a greyed color or colors it increases the intensity of the pure color.  You’re looking for a high contrast of value or intensity.  You can see how the highlight on the hair of the girl on the left really shines but the one on the right is too similar in value and does not have enough contrast to make the highlight stand out.  So watch out for using values or saturation/intensities that are too similar.

For an even greater effect use complementary colors because, as we know, these colors opposite each other on the color wheel have a natural ability to affect each other in ways that intensify the other.

There are numerous artist who are masters of this technique.  The best I’ve ever seen is the painter Joseph Turner.   A more contemporary example would of course be Brian Stelfreeze.

Thanks for reading and make sure to try this in your next painting.  The best way to learn is to do.

I’ve always wanted to be an art teacher.  Then I looked into the salaries that most teachers make and it wasn’t a pretty picture.  The past few weeks I’ve been working on projects that I can’t post yet and might not be able to for a little while and I thought what can I do to keep my blog rolling that won’t stray to far.  In comes “Getting your learn on”, hopefully a weekly post showcasing a particular art technique, concept, idea  or even a review of an art related material like paint brushes or sticks.  Yes, you can paint with sticks.

Stay tuned.  I’ll post the first one tomorrow.