Oil Painting on Gessoed Paper, April 2023
Reference and Inspiration:
A Warm, High Contrast Profile of a Pear
In the spring of 2023, I enrolled in an art class at the Delaware Art Museum. Our first project was given to us: a reference image of a pear. I was, admittedly, too confident that I could paint it well because I thought the subject was simple. Seems silly now. I found out I didn't know as much as I had thought. This project revealed some limitations in my painting skills.
The Wash:
Lines, Darks, Lights with Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna (Brown)
I wasn’t very familiar with washes at the time of this painting, though I thought I had been. Here's another artist's quick clip of using a wash, and I really liked their longer tutorial explaining their methods.
If you don't know, a wash is a single, neutral color a painter deludes with paint thinner (or water for acrylic paint), and maps out the lines, shapes, and values of the painting. In this case, painting the whole pear piece in one color.
The wash in this project was the first one that I redid and redid, trying to match the darkest darks, lights, and midtones as best as I could. It turned out to make a big difference in how well the painting turned out.
Blocking In Color:
Intentional Paint Mixing and Targeting Value-Shapes
This pear was a good starter painting because it was a simple subject with simple shapes making it up. Here, I blurred my eyes to make out the most important average colors of the shapes. To ensure I mixed a color matching the reference image, I would mix a little paint and lift the pallet knife with the color sample to the photo.
I mixed as much as paint as possible for each section before picking up my brush. I hadn't worked that way before. Then I blocked in each section with the appropriate color (painting over the dried wash). This is still my usual process because it worked so well in this class. I still tried to keep this block-in layer thin. If thin, it's easier to cover up, wipe off, push and pull. The final layers were the only ones I wanted to be thick, breaking the big and simple shapes into smaller, impressionistic ones.
What's on my pallet:
Painting Challenges & Solutions:
Hitting Correct Color Notes and Rendering Accurate Lines and Angles
I think every piece of art teaches me about my skill level and what I need to work on.
When it comes to this pear, it taught me that small differences in hue (what we normally call “color”), chroma (how saturated/pure to how gray a color note is), and especially value (how black/white or light/dark a color note is) seriously affect how accurate we perceive a painting to be; it can look really right if done well, and really wrong the further inaccurate the color notes are. Yes, I had learned this before, but I guess I didn't take it seriously enough or had never really accounted for it. There are many great videos on color theory out there; here's one of my favorites.
Also, down to more art fundamentals, the angles of my lines drawn could really screw up what I was painting. That also sounds obvious if you make art, but it is always a struggle for me.
Anyway, it really sunk in how many adjustments it would take to make an accurate painting work, which explains, in my mind, why so many of my paintings in the past didn't seem to render what I saw to my satisfaction.
Final Impression and Lessons Learned:
Value Does All the Work, and I Need to Work on It More
While I started art many years ago, this simple project helped me to realize I had been getting my fundamentals mostly wrong. I had too much confidence in my understanding, and not enough concern about what I didn't know.
Since this piece, I have started to systemize how I make paintings. Not only am I practicing mixing and matching color notes, but I'm going back to the fundamentals I skipped earlier in my schooling: sketching thumbnails of the whole piece to figure out the lines, angles, shapes, darks and lights; washing the canvas with one color to lay down and refine the darks and lights before blocking in color. Back to basics. Staying humble.
I’m guessing students at art schools have already been taught these things and exercised them more. That may only be true for the ones who have stuck with it. Anyway, it's been nice being humbled by this pear and learning ways I can account for the gaps in my knowledge and skill set.
