Summer Evening Introduction to Oil and Acrylic Painting
with Simon Klein
A ten week evening course for beginners and improvers
Working from direct observation, students at all levels will be encouraged to explore different uses of paint and colour to respond to shapes, colours, surface textures and reflections and negative shapes as revealed by light.
We shall work from still life, and in June and July when the evening light is good enough and weather permitting, work outdoors from the landscape near the studios, eventually developing a painting back in the studio from our plein air studies.
Klein Across the Gardens
Scheme of Work for Beginners
1/ Drawing with the paint brush and using a view finder compositionally.
2/ Blocking in areas, working from large areas to smaller specifics of objects and light.
3/ Exploring warm or cold shadows with a four colour, palette.
4/ Looking at colour saturation in relation to observational realism. (Advanced: Painting grounds, the advantages of a good ground/substrate,)
5/ How to make a painting with cold and warm primary colours in relation to the colour circle.
6/ (Further Painting with cold and warm primary colours adding secondary colours in relation to the colour circle.)
7/ Wet into wet painting on a tonal prepared surface using the above palette enlarged to incorporate 3 earth colours. (Advanced: colour pigmentation, the difference between lakes, Indian yellow etc and organic pigments.)
8/ Observational colour and colour mixing on the palette. (Advanced)/ Broken colours and abstracted observational colour work
Iterative observational practice throughout.
Advanced Students
Klein Yellow Jug
Through ongoing iterative practice students will be learning the following:
1/ Drawing with colour and a brush, blocking in and redrawing with a paint brush.
2/ Allowing light to form the shapes and negative spaces within your painting as much as the objects you are looking at.
3/ Learning to selectively look and paint from what you see and challenging what you know.
4/ Assessing what is working and what needs to change. Using a mirror as a corrective aid.
5/ Working quickly as a help to understanding composition intuitively.
6/ Using a neutral earth textured ground/substrate for making sketches.
7/ Using a larger flat baker’s brush on the length, in order to cover larger areas and the corner of the brush to add detail to shapes
8/ Using a viewfinder to help compose your image.
9/ Wet into wet, wet over dry and glazing techniques.
10/ How to negotiate making a painting within specific time constraints arriving at a sustained conclusion.
11/ Selecting other artists work to study and develop working practices from.
12/ Accurate colour mixing with a warm/cold colour palette
Advanced students will be encouraged to research good painting supports and substrates that they find conducive to their way of working.
They will also be taught an understanding of pigment numbers in relation to colour and colour effects, and taught to develop a greater understanding of colour and depth in their work through the use of glazes and scumbling on work realised over 2 to 3 weeks.
An advanced student will look more carefully at how to structure a painting so that the negative spaces would count more, so that there would be no dead space across the picture surface. They would be expected to spend more time looking and understanding other paintings they find interesting, how they work and incorporating these ideas in relation to practice and technique into their own work.
Materials:
A3 (16”x12”/42x30 cm) painting boards or paper for acrylic painting. (We tend to go through one of these a week so best to buy in bulk).
A4/A5 canvas boards or primed mdf boards for small landscape studies.
A palette with a thumb hole for your non-drawing hand. Tear off paper palettes with a thumb hole are good.
2 to 3 shallow screw top jars for medium and cleaning fluid. (Jam jars, perhaps a shallower one for the painting medium, deeper for the cleaning jar.)
In acrylic that would be water in both. In oil that would be a painting medium in one and a cleaning spirit in the other.
Go to a proper art shop like Cass art or Jacksons. Student quality paint from esteemed paint manufacturers is good as it is made in large batches and has to work by reputation, so they wouldn’t make it if students couldn’t get good results from it.
I recommend the following paints:
If working in Oils: Winton, Georgian, Cass art range or Jacksons artist’s paint.
Occasionally one could put a Professional artists’ range tube like Winsor and Newton artists paint, Jacksons professional etc or even Michael Harding but they are more saturated with coloured pigment and therefore more expensive and stronger than an equivalent student colour.
Cheaper paints like WH Smiths etc will have much more filler in them etc and to be avoided.
If working in Acrylics: Rowney System 3, Cass Art acrylic paint, Galleria.
One can buy a box of 8 colours in most of the above ranges, but try and ensure you have the following colours:
Titanium White - Cad red (hue) - Alizarin crimson - Cadmium yellow (hue) - Lemon yellow or cadmium lemon - Ultramarine blue - Coeruleum blue(hue) - Viridian or Pthalo green - Yellow ochre - Raw umber - Burnt sienna
Brushes: Flat , Round or filbert brushes 6, 8 and 12 size are good, in hog hair or brushes made from acrylic type materials. Careful of brushes that aren’t stiff enough. Daler Rowney graduate brushes are relatively cheap especially the bigger ones, and excellent I find for all levels.