Accurate colour is one of the most important skills you can have as a realist painter. Why? Well, being able to mix accurately gives you: Believable colour – a natural, effortless look to your work Three dimensional form – good colour relationships between light and shadow create form Light and depth – believable space and
Mastering Colour: How to Paint Better Still Life
Last week, I wrote about the five modelling factors of a sphere, and how understanding what they are – and also being able to match the colours for each one – makes painting realistic colour and form much easier. Yesterday, I gave a webinar in which I demonstrated in a bit more detail how to
A Blue Lemon: Why Understanding Colour is the Key to Realism
“Paint what you see, not what you know”. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. And most of the time, it’s pretty good advice. But it’s not the whole picture. Why? Because you can’t always trust what you see. What we see is a result of what our perceptual systems show us, processed through our previous experience
How to Make a Munsell Value Scale
If you were to ask me: what the most useful thing I’ve done is, what’s made the most difference to my progress, when I saw the biggest leap forward in my ability to paint realistically, I’d have to say it was practising with the Munsell value scale. Now I know that value scales may not
Gratitude – What Almost Dying Taught Me About How To Live
A few weeks ago, I began to feel some pain in my abdomen and lower back. Being busy, and not wanting to interrupt my life and my work, I ignored it, thinking it might go away. Just in case you’re wondering, that’s never a good plan. It didn’t. After a few weeks, it got too
Close to the Edge: How Edge Control Helps You Create Depth in Your Paintings
Edge handling is a fundamental skill of drawing and painting. I’d put it up there with drawing accuracy, values and colour as one of the most important skills of realist art. The reason I place such importance on edge handling is the great potential it has for creating the illusion of depth. Types of edges Although
Three Steps to Painting More Natural Colour and Light
It’s easy, even trite, to say that if we want to get better at something, we need to practise. It’s also not enough. Because it’s far too easy to practise in a way that means it actually takes us longer than it should to master a skill. Practice Imperfect The way you practise becomes ingrained
How a Little Known Experiment with Chickens Can Help Artists Master Values
On November 3rd, 1933 the Nazi party, recently come to power, demanded that all professors begin their lectures with the Nazi salute. Wolfgang Köhler, a professor and director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Berlin, refused. Then he went one step further, and wrote an article openly criticising the Nazi party. It was
How a Simple Version of Sight Size Can Help You Paint More Realistically
I imagine many people think of sight size mostly as a technique used in ateliers to train drawing accuracy. Bargue drawings, cast drawings, that kind of thing. But I wonder if sight size sometimes gets a bit of a bad press, as if it was a kind of self-flagellation realist artists must go through before
What a Little Boy Taught Me About Achieving The “Impossible”
We were sitting in the doctor’s office, listening to his description of a little boy and our hearts were sinking more with every minute. For us, this was the culmination of a three year process to adopt our first child, a process that had been fraught with frustration and doubt. And now this doctor, with
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