Tips

I’m delighted to say that I’m attending a seminar this week. I needed the shot-in-the-arm! Every time I attend one of these things, it brings home the fact that so much of painting has to do with the accumulation of tips. Here are a few helpful tips I’ve learned over the years. Sometimes they make the difference between a frustrating experience and finding my way through of a problem.

If you’re having difficulty drawing, try closing one eye. When drawing a face or figure, a few nanometers one way or the other can distort the final image. Viewing with only one eye helps flatten perception and prevent the spacial shift that comes with two eyed vision. (Use both eyes when evaluating color or value). Also, don’t forget the other two simple techniques for accuracy: 1) visually measure with your arm extended and 2) drop a vertical line to be sure things align as they should.

Look at your painting’s reverse image. When checking your work, you can see it with fresh eyes if you view it using a mirror. This helps us evaluate our work as if it belonged to someone else. If a mirror isn’t handy, turn your painting upside down.

Use a value scale. A value scale helps remind us how dark a number ten value actually is! We may think we are using the entire value range but in reality we are not.

Note the direction and intensity of the light source. If the light source is strong, you have the perfect excuse to plow in the reflected light and color. In addition, the edge of shadows should track to the light source.

And finally, don’t forget to use more than one color in any one area. The mark of a real beginner is someone who, when painting a red shirt, paints it all the same red. They may simply shift the values without shifting the color, or in the case of oil colors, simply add black. At a minimum, everything in life is color impacted by what ever is adjacent to the object and the color temperature of the light. At least slide in a few analogous colors for energy and life.

That’s it for now. Please add the tips you’ve found helpful here.

I’m off to pick up a few more tips. (It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it.)

Cheers,
Lynn Powers

What do you love about art?

Much of my personal struggle is to improve while NOT destroying what I love about painting and drawing. The drive to improve can disrupt growth’s natural unfolding and put too much pressure on everything it touches. For me, the element of play, risk taking and discovery needs to be integral to the whole thing.

We all need to choreograph our own dance, which may include classes and workshops. But I’ve also found it very helpful to remind myself of what it is I love about art, and give it value. To improve without passion and joy is sterile. Art needs to nourish.

So here’s part of my list: I love…

• – seeing something come from nothing
• – hanging out with my art buddies
• – the challenge and thrill if anything comes of what I do
• – the feel of the brush going across the paper
• – colors mingling on the paper

What moves you to create? Link here to add to the list!

Cheers,
Lynn Powers

The Next Step

Like many of you, I’m trying to figure out what the heck I’m doing in my own art. For me, it’s frequently a love/hate relationship. It’s full of choices: Realism vs. abstract; muted vs. powerful; watercolor vs. oil or some other medium. I read about people that are happy all the time with their work and I wonder what they’re smoking, and were can I get it?

I doubt it would bug me so much if I felt I had all the time in the world to explore possibilities, wander until I bumped into the perfect combination of media/style/content by accident. I envy those lucky folks that go to art school and follow a sequence of classes with expert guides.

Life is what it is, and we are lucky to have the luxury to paint at all. And I suppose the next step is all anyone needs to know. It’s all anyone can know because the next painting could take us in a totally different direction. The challenge is to not worry about the long term direction and permit ourselves to be directed by ourselves. That’s one of the reasons why it’s such an adventure.

Above is a close up of my latest effort, “Homeless in Maui”.

Cheers,
Lynn Powers

Visual Memory

Twice in the last week I’ve heard of a practice that at one time would have seemed wildly strange, but now makes perfect sense. Here it is: Draw something accurately that you are not looking at. (It is not blind contour drawing.)

An example of this would be students in a life drawing class that have their model up a flight of stairs in another studio away from where they are working. They were encouraged to put to memory as much information as possible and then return to the easel downstairs and draw.

Crazy? Not really. As artists, we train ourselves to look for visual information. It is as concrete as math. It’s just not left brain.

My folks had an artistic friend in high school that later became a teacher at Art Center in Los Angeles. His name was Reynold Brown. (Reynold was mentor of CCP artist Craig Nelson, and many others.) As a kid in high school, Reynold would go on sketching trips with my folks and never take a sketch book. He would just sit and look around. To the amazement of his friends, when he returned to class he’d paint a complete painting with details others had missed. Later in life he could construct complicated scenes combining the information he’d gleaned over the years, without the need to step outdoors. He had a library of visual information stored in his brain.

Reynold may have been extraordinary with his early ability to do this but it is a skill that can be learned.

I am continually amazed by artists. We can only imagine what is possible given time and focus.

Cheers,
Lynn Powers

Select what’s important

I think poetry is a good comparison to painting. The limits of both art forms do not permit either the artist or poet to describe in detail the minutia of their subject. In fact, the more selective the artist, the more powerful the work. The challenge is to determine what conveys the message most clearly.

I enjoy thinking about which features or gestures best express how I feel about my model. Is the model bold, shy, wise, funny? I try to consider if I need to blur an eye, accent a cheek bone, use strong pure color or pastel tones, etc. This can’t help but bring my own preconceived ideas into play. Consequently, I learn as much about myself as I do about whomever I’m painting. On a good day, the visual image becomes secondary to the emotional expression.

This is the part of art I especially love. It’s also the part of art I think is the most often overlooked. Capturing the visual likeness is seductive. Manipulating technical skills is also seductive. But like the sirens of old, we may find it wise to look beyond their beautiful song to find a more personal direction.

Cheers
Lynn Powers