Yesterday was the first live webinar I’ve given since coming out of hospital, and also the first time I’ve had a brush in my hands since then too. I’m not sure it was a good idea to do my first painting for a while live, but actually the webinar went pretty well. This one was
Artificial Lights for Painting
An interesting side-effect of turning pro is that I can’t always choose when I paint, mostly because I need to paint more. I still need to be producing even when there isn’t enough light to paint by. As well as painting, I do my free webinars late in the evening, UK time. That’s because the
The Colour of Shadows
Getting your shadows right contributes immensely to being able to create a feeling of form, light and depth in your work. Shadows do seem to be particularly vexing for a lot of realist artists. But they really don’t have to be. If you put into practice what I’m going to show you in this blog
Colour is Easier to Learn Than You Think: Here’s How
There’s a pervasive idea in painting that colour can’t be learned. That you either get colour, or you don’t. If you’d asked me whether that was true a few years ago, I might have been tempted to believe you. I struggled and struggled with colour. I felt that there was some special knowledge that I
Three Simple Steps to Mixing Any Colour You Need
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
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
Colour Mixing With Less Stress
Colour is hard. Let’s just get that out of the way first. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be so many competing colour theories around – both the useful ones and the ones that, at times, border on the ridiculous. There also wouldn’t be so many arguments about colour on art forums. And there’d be a