workshop handout

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with Richard Robinson

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Introduction to the Workshop

Why are we here? Workshops are for answering questions. The first question is why are we here? Besides making friends and spending time in this beautiful place, we want to learn how to make a beautiful painting and enjoy the painting process more by having more confidence in our abilities. Well, what makes a good painting? Lettuce think about that. What do we enjoy looking at? There's no simple answer of course. Different images create different responses in the human brain. Let's start simple. Large expanses of plain colour may indeed prompt an emotional response, but there's little else for the brain to spark off and so it is a limited experience, like eating a salad that only has lettuce in it, or listening to a song with only one or two notes in it. It's somewhat hypnotic or meditational, so it has it has value there, and there's certainly a place for that, but as an artist you want to be creating a painting that not only stimulates your viewer, but also stimulates you as you create it.

Ultimately a painter is always painting for themselves and for an audience. As children we learn the joy of using all the available colours and smooshing them around the paper until it all turns to mud. It's fun! But we soon learn that we're actually painting for more than just the pleasure of painting - Mum and Dad don't want mud all the time, they want to see you paint a flower or a sun in the sky. Suddenly you find yourself painting for an audience and wanting to please. If painting large areas of flat colour really satisfies you then keep doing that! However, most painters tend to reach for something more.

When I critique any painting there are three general criteria I look at - Design, Colour, Brushwork. When I'm looking at representational work I also add a fourth criteria of Realism. Within those first three criteria are the keys to what I consider a beautiful painting, and when I'm assessing these criteria I'm looking for two things - variety and unity. Variety in that the work hasn’t been oversimplified, and unity in that everything should work together for the good of the painting.

See More, Paint Less The problem we usually face as painters is that we just love to simplify things, to make symbols of things, we love putting things in little mental boxes and labelling them so we don't have to expend so much energy figuring them out every time we see them, we do

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this with everything we encounter, even people. If we didn't do that we'd be overloaded with new information all the time and it would be exhausting. When we are learning new things our brains are busy trying to slot the information into boxes we already have available - relating new information to old information.

If you see a new type of tree on your travels to a tropical island there's already a box waiting labeled "TREES". It may be the most amazingly convoluted banyon tree you've seen in your life with monkeys swinging through it and a thousand bird's of paradise nestled among the towering branches, it's leaves sparkling with all the colours of the rainbow after a tropical downpour, and the trunk and hanging roots are almost set alight by the fiery sunset, but it still goes in the TREE box - you hardly need to look at it. We have our brains doing that the whole time on autopilot, but as artists it's our job to see what others don't, to see outside the boxes, past the symbols and to see the differences, the variations in nature, the complexity and the achingly beautiful subtlety of it all, to process as much of that as we can and translate it to paint on canvas.

Picasso said that as adult artists we spend all our time trying to paint like children again, by which I suppose he meant to paint with the joyless abandon of youth, but in order to see past our symbols we also need to see like a child again, with fresh eyes as if it were the first time we saw a tree or a field of wheat. How can we do that? It's a real challenge.

Our second big challenge, especially with landscape painting is that we just can't paint all the complexity we're given. So we've got two opposing problems. It's a balancing act. On the one hand we need to see more than we usually do, to avoid seeing things as symbols, and on the other hand we need to paint less than what we see. How can we do that? In this course we're going to look at some ways to help retrain our brains so we can see more and paint less.

Why is the sky blue Mummy? So much to learn, so little time! Making a great painting is so much more than just copying what we are seeing onto canvas. Nature herself only very rarely produces perfect compositions for paintings - there's almost always something that needs changing to make a painting 'read' better than the scene. Unlike a still life or a figure setup we can't physically move a landscape around to suit our painting, but if we go moving mountains in our paintings willy nilly without understanding a few basic principles there's going to be trouble in the making. If you've ever tried to add a figure to a scene you'll know exactly what I mean. For the analytically minded among us, understanding why our visual world looks the way it does can be just as exciting as getting it down on canvas. Once we come to understand the principles of light acting on form we are much freer to use our artistic license in rearranging our landscape and the light which reveals it without sacrificing realism. In this course we will also try to add to your understanding of the principles of light and form so you have more freedom to change the world around you on canvas.



So yes we have a lot to cover in the few days that we have here, but I have a PLAN! The plan goes something like this:

Day1: Design Visual Concept, Notan, Light and Shadow Families, Limited Value Studies

Day2: Colour Two Value Statement, Warm & Cool

Day3: Colour Two Value Statement, Warm & Cool

Day4: Brushwork & Edges Abstraction, Variety, Techniques

Day5: Advanced Colour Gradations & Bending Colour

Day6: Expression Finding your visual voice, Putting it all together



Visual Concept

Every good painting begins with a strong visual concept. This is something that beginners usually miss completely because they are so concerned with trying to capture the likeness of their subject.

Here is a list of visual concepts written by Robert Bissett:

Interesting ShapesGreat ColourUnusual TextureSharp ContrastQuiet SimplicityFascinating ComplexityAtmosphereMoodMorning or Evening LightWeather EffectsBack LightingHorizontal Movement, vertical counter-movementLight Shape suspended amid darksLight Shape moving against Dark ShapeLight Shape separating dark shape from mid-value shapeEruption of fragmented shapes and coloursEtc., Etc.... Note that they are concepts, not things. For example it’s not a ‘beautiful tree’ or ‘big clouds’. A good painter begins with a strong visual concept to base a painting on. The visual concept is usually suggested by the subject itself, especially in plein air painting, but you can just as easily apply your own visual concept to the subject or even begin with a visual concept in mind and find a subject to suit your idea. More often than not the visual concept will be the very thing that you love most about the scene, the thing that compels you to paint it, like the dramatic lighting or the strong colour or interesting shapes. The important thing is to clearly understand this motivation at the very beginning and write it down so you keep it in mind through the entire painting process.

Here are a few examples of some of my own paintings which began with a strong visual concept:

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Now write down in a few brief words what it is about the following three scenes that first stirs your emotions. This could be the visual concept for your painting. Choose from the previous list or come up with your own.

Complexity made Simpl.

Landscape is often called the most difficult of painting genres, however I think it depends more on what you're used to painting. I blanch at the accurate drawing required for portraiture for instance. Certainly I can see that landscape painting requires more skill in wielding our artistic license. We can't move trees and mountains around in the scene like we can apples in a still life, and we can't adjust the lighting as we would in a figure setup.

Visual Concept: Organic Complexity Visual Concept: Spotlit Foreground Visual Concept: Explosive Colour

Visual Concept: Glowing Light Visual Concept: Golden Evening Light Dynamic Patterns, Dark Header

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Most beginners get confused by all the detail and variation in the landscape so learning ways to simplify our subject is one of the biggest keys to successful landscape painting. As I said, we need to learn to see more and paint less. Why should we paint less? Don't our brains love complexity and detail? Yes they do, but they also love a….. mystery. We love using our imaginations to fill in the gaps. Some artists do paint in a super realistic style and I admire them for their patience and their skill, but for me, a painting holds my attention for longer, that is, I get more value from it, if every object is not spelled out to me. It's the difference between reading an encyclopedic dissertation on the geological properties of waterways or enjoying a story, a poem or a song about a river. It has more soul.

So, simplifying is good. There are many ways to simplify a scene. There are ways to simplify your vision, and there are ways to simplify your painting. The first and most fundamental way to simplify your painting is to divide it into light and dark. I don't mean light and shadow at this point - I mean light and dark, and more specifically, the balance and design of your light and dark spaces, or the 'Notan'. Notan is a Japanese word meaning the balance of light and dark. Using small notan designs is the best way I know of to begin designing a painting. Most of the way we see our visual world is in terms of light and dark patterns. Colour is really just the icing on the cake. Our brain recognizes the silhouettes of objects first and needs very little other visual information to work with.

When I see a notan design I see the absolute core of a painting, the skeleton that everything else is built on. Notan is a great way to sort out the placement of the major masses before you dive into your painting. What I try to achieve with my small notan designs is an interesting abstract design which expresses something about what I want to say about my subject, or the ‘visual concept’. To help with that I often write the visual concept at the top of the page which sums up what I want to express in the painting. In the case below I wrote 'Bold Shapes, Strong Contrast'. Then I went ahead and did a few different notan designs.



Here is a photo for you to practice notan design with. In the space below write your visual concept and then make 4 small notan designs. Keep them really small (no wider than 2”) and think about combining your darks - joining dark shapes together to create a simpler, stronger design. Squinting helps. Use a black felt pen with a flexible tip like a Tombow.


Photo by Lorna Allan


Light and Shadow Families

Light divides our visual world fairly neatly into two families - the light family, where objects are touched by direct light, and the shadow family, which is only touched by reflected light from objects in the light family. Light and shade, nice and simple.

Note: Reflected lights belong to the shadow family and ‘halftones’ or ‘midtones’ usually belong to the light family. In a low key painting the halftones belong to the dark but in a

high key painting they belong to the light. In a full range key they tend to belong to the darks, but as always the choice is yours.

When you paint outside you need to simplify things for yourself as much as possible and have a solid process to follow, otherwise you will be overwhelmed by all the complexity out there. We go to do battle with the elements and bring back their gold! Your process is your shield that stops you being overwhelmed and your imagination is your sword. When I paint outdoors here is the process I follow:

1. Find a scene that moves me.2. Find the visual concept for that scene. What’s the big idea?3. Draw or imagine the notan design. What’s the dark/light design?4. Paint or imagine a limited value study. Where will I place the main values?5. Paint or imagine the colour study. Where will I place the main colours?6. Paint the final painting. Dark to light, big to small, thin to thick.



We’ve looked at Visual Concept and Notan and the next step is to figure out the value structure of your painting. We can see the value of a colour if we convert it to grayscale, like in a black and white photo. Value gives us form. When everything is the same value, like in a whiteout fog, we can’t see anything.

In order to preserve our sanity we are not going to dive into colour on the first day of this workshop. We’ll go crazy on day 2 instead. Today we are going to paint a limited value study. If the notan design is the skeleton of a painting, the value is the muscle that makes a painting work. Colour is the skin on top that makes it look nice, but all the real work is done by value. You could say value has the most value. In order to keep things simple, we’re going to paint a limited value study of our scene. I’ve heard it said that if you want to win a painting competition you just do a 3 value painting in colour. I’m personally still trying to figure out how to do that, but there you are. We’re going to paint a 5 value study in grayscale. Here are some examples:

Note that the scale does not necessarily have to go from black to white. The one above goes from dark gray to light gray. It’s up to you. Notice how closely the limited value studies relate to the original notan designs below.

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Goals for your limited value study

1. Design a strong value structure from your scene based on your visual concept and your notan design.

2. Learn to see colour in terms of value.3. Understand the principle of conserving your values. That is, practicing compressing the

entire visual range into 5 premixed values.4. Explore the elements of your scene and how they relate to each other.5. Explore the possibilities of variations in sharp and soft edges. How far can you push

these to help enhance your focal areas?6. Keep a simplified value structure by keeping your pre-mixed values separate and don’t

create large gradations. Soft edges yes, gradations no. Simpler is stronger. Don’t mix the values together on your palette either.

7. Paint from dark to light, big to small, thin to thick.8. Use your palette knife if you wish.9. Enjoy the freedom of using expressive brushwork without the worry of colour mixing.

Painting Challenge Painting outdoors from life, follow the plan below to end up with a finished 12x16” limited value study of a scene.

1. Find a scene that moves you.2. Find the visual concept. What’s the big idea?3. Draw the notan design. What’s the dark/light design?4. Paint a limited value study. Where will I place the main values?



Self Assessment

What part of today’s painting challenges did you find the most difficult and why?

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What could you have done better?

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What part of today’s painting challenges did you find the easiest? Why?

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We’ve just learned about simplifying our scene into a good design using Visual Concept, Notan, Light and Shadow Families, and Limited Value Studies.

The next step is to start thinking about colour, which may be just the icing on the cake, but what fantastic icing it is! When you start to think of all the limitless combinations of colour available to us it can be really overwhelming, so let’s keep it simple to start with.

Our end goal for this lesson is to be able to mentally break down a scene into large shapes of light and shadow and get this down on canvas using a simple ‘two value statement’ for each object.

Two Value Statement

Form at its simplest - the 2 value statement.

You will have found with the notan designs and limited value studies that we actually need very little visual information for our brains to be able to interpret what it is we are looking at. We need colour least of all to understand light and form. When we see colour in a scene we are being told two things at the same time; the colour of the object and the colour of the light upon that object. The variety of colour we can actually see in any object is mind boggling, but to paint it convincingly we really only need two colours - one colour for the object in shadow and one colour for the object in light. For colour that’s about as simple as it gets.

The tricky thing is getting the relationship between those two colours correct for that particular object in that particular light and then getting that right for every object in the scene so that we end up with a convincing effect of that particular light throughout the entire scene. Sounds ridiculously difficult doesn’t it? Well, if you can get just one pair of colours right, you can get them all right, it’s just a matter of perseverance. No one is born with the ability to be able to do this, but perseverance is not always shared out equally.



Guidelines

There are no rules on how you should do this or colour mixing recipes to achieve the best results, but there are some guidelines which do help to keep in mind when you’re trying to paint the light and shadow families as a two value statement. Here are a few of them:

• Warm and cool. Warm light (yellow-orange-red) like direct morning and evening light tends to produce cooler shadows (purple-blue-green).

• The difference in value (ratio) between light and shadow keeps constant across objects that are the same distance from you. As objects recede their values get closer together due to the intervening atmosphere.

• A black object in light is lighter in value than a white object in shadow.

Matching a Colour Refer to Appendix 1 : “Mastering Colour, Chapter 5, Mixing Colour”.

Painting Challenge

Paint one 12x16" or similar sized sketch of a scene keeping it as simple as possible by making a two value statement for each object. For instance a red bucket will need one colour for the shadow and one colour for the light, but if it also has a white handle you’ll need to add a colour for the white handle in the shade and a colour for the handle in the light. Similarly a palm tree would have one set of dark and light colours for the trunk and another set for the greenery.

Follow this process:

1. Design your painting first with Notan designs and/or a small 3 value limited study.Consider designing a composition where you have one dominant value (ie. it takes up the most room on the canvas), a secondary value, and a third value which gets a only very small area. You will usually find it’s the value with the least real estate that captures the most attention.

2. Place your darkest dark, lightest light and easiest colour first along with its shadow. Doing this first sets the colour limits for your painting. Paint your lights thicker than your darks.

3. Paint all the shadow families, and then all the light families.Compare like to like. (Compare darks with darks and lights with lights.)

4. Take a photo of your painting at this point - before you get carried away with detail.



5. Add a few refining details if you like, but don't get fiddly!You can make colour variations within the individual shapes, but make sure you keep the lights light and the darks dark.

6. Take a photo of the finished painting and compare it with your photo of the scene.Did you go overboard with detail or not? Was the painting stronger before you added detail or did it lack something? There is no right or wrong answer, only your artistic opinion.

”Haleiwa, Epilogue” 9x12” Oil on Canvas by Richard Robinson



One of the last things people notice about a painting is its brushwork simply because most work is seen from a distance at first and then viewed in more detail as the viewer moves closer. To me, beautiful brushwork has variety, unity, purpose and vigour. Up close it should be an interesting abstract collection of marks which resolves into a coherent scene as we retreat from the canvas.

Great brushwork comes from the confidence of knowing how brush and paint and canvas work together in the subtlest of ways and that sort of tactile knowledge only comes from years of painting.

Here are a few tell-tales of beginner’s brushwork:Hesitant - many small brushstrokes inaccurately placed.Overworked - brushing over areas again and again leading to muddy colour.Destructive - brushstrokes not used well to denote the forms of objects.Monotonous - lack of variety in mark making.

The first step towards overcoming these pitfalls is to just begin considering your brushwork in earnest. A good question to ask yourself to open your creative channels is “what would happen if...” and see where that takes you. PLAY with your paint! See what is possible - hold your brush a different way, use the side, the tip, drag, dab, push, pull,

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more paint, less paint, different pressure, change brushes, change speed, use a palette knife, use a toothbrush, use a chicken, scratch back, rub off, rub on, impasto, dribbles, scribbles, splatters, smooth, rough, timid, tough. Enjoy!

Edges

Of all the elements a painter must consider including subject, design, value and colour, perhaps the most often overlooked by beginners is the subtle art of edges. Edge variety is an important key to promoting viewer participation, inviting their minds to fill in the details mysteriously obscured by a lost edge. The best painters do this so subtly we are not even aware our eyes are being lead through the canvas going from one sharp edge to the next. In this workshop we are going to look at the possibilities of edges and how they might enhance your work. Why edges workOur brains are very selective in the way we perceive things. We recognise objects first by their outer shape, their silhouette, and in low light conditions this is very useful indeed because it means we can quickly tell the difference between a sabertooth tiger or a friend wearing a furry jacket. We can also do this well from a great distance which is even more useful because it gives us time to run away. Sharp edges give us better shape recognition than soft edges so our brains are hardwired to seek out sharp edges first in every situation.

Our eyes themselves have a very limited focal area, so much so that if you stare at the full stop at the end of this sentence you will notice everything a few inches beyond that becomes increasingly unfocused with softer edges. When we have a variety of hard and soft edges in a painting we are making use of the way our eyes see and the way our brains tell us to see. Variety is also one of the biggest keys to making a painting more interesting and appealing to look at, so any way you look at it, edges are very important.

Where edges workWhere should you make soft or hard edges? Like everything that's a personal choice. Nature gives us some good suggestions however and she relies mostly on value. Where two similar values come together we can often see a soft edge, like where a form shadow meets a cast shadow or a light meets a light. Where two different values meet in contrast we can often see a sharp edge. Within shadowed areas there are usually a lot of soft edges and within light areas there are often a lot of sharp edges. Squinting at your scene will help you see the difference in edges.



You can choose to make any edge hard or soft though and often times I will soften an edge or part of an edge simply because I want more variation. Softening an edge can also help to make a form appear to roll away from you and add depth to a painting in that if your eyes are focusing on something in the foreground those objects further back in space will be out of focus and so have softer edges. We don't have the dimension of depth in a painting like we do with sculpture, so softening edges in the background or away from a focal area will help to trick the eye into believing there is actual depth in a painting. If you do have a centre of focus in your painting it's always good to save your sharpest edges for that area as that will help lead the eye there. TechniquesMaking a sharp edge with paint is not difficult - it's what a brush or palette knife creates naturally when you first put paint on the canvas. There are a few different ways to soften an edge though:

1. The end of a brush stroke is usually quite soft as the brush lifts from the canvas. Using that to your advantage can save you from most reworking. For instance if you want a soft edge on the top of some grasses then brush upwards.

2. Painting into a previous layer of wet paint will give you the opportunity to soften edges as the paint mixes together on your brush and on the canvas. Beware of overdoing this when lights meet darks or cools meet warms though. That path is a muddy one.

3. Softly dry-brushing over a wet edge in any direction with a clean dry brush gives you great control over the quality of the edge. Soft bristled brushes work well but be careful to keep your brush clean and dry when doing this. One or two strokes will normally do the trick.

4. Finger painting. You can use your finger or any soft round object to smoosh the paint together on an edge BUT my good friend and painting mentor John Crump advises against this as you don't have as much control of edge quality as with a brush and a finger will tend to go through the paint layers into the canvas, creating a ridge in the paint and often making a line which needs to be softened again. I still do it sometimes (naughty) - depends how controlled you want to be.

5. For oil painters very thin paint with lots of thinners in it can be used in the base stages like watercolour washes which merge together making soft edges. These can be really beautiful areas of interesting paintwork. The trick is in leaving some of these areas showing in your finished painting if you want to work in that way. The same goes for acrylics and watercolours as well, except of course the thinner is then not oil based.



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6. Lightly rubbing a rag or tissues over some areas of a wet painting can produce some interesting soft edges but of course it's very hard to control over small areas and you often need to repaint areas after doing this. Sometimes I do this when I'm totally frustrated with a painting and it often leads to good things, largely because you're then not being so precious about your painting.

7. Vigorously scratching a wet edge with the palette knife or back of a brush can produce an interestingly textured soft edge which from a distance works well and up close adds textural interest. That's for pretty loose painting.

Painting ChallengePaint one 12x16" or similar sized painting of a scene with your main focus being on creating dynamic interesting brushwork. Don’t let everything else go though - let’s just say this is the most important ball you have to juggle today. Good luck!



Colour GradationsLook in any and every place in nature and you will see things changing from one colour into another. If you find something which doesn't have a gradation in it, you're simply not looking hard enough. You don't need to paint gradations anywhere near as smoothly as nature shows us in order to create a light filled painting - in fact when I paint I try to avoid it. A perfectly smooth painted gradation doesn't hold as much interest for me as one that is textured with brush strokes. After all, your brush strokes are uniquely yours - they are your signature, so why try to hide that? Gradations can be small or large. As a rule of thumb I try not to paint any more than one or two square inches of colour without ‘bending’ the colour to something different. It’s very easy to just keep brushing the same colour on because of our tendency to want to simplify everything so you need to keep reminding yourself to bend your colour until it becomes habit. When I talk about bending a colour (a term I learned from Scott Christensen) I imagine nudging a colour around the colour wheel, left or right, from its starting point. Don’t know which way to bend it? Just look at your scene and it will let you know when you compare one colour area with the one right next to it. The more you practice this the easier it gets.

There are any number of ways to create a gradation from one colour to another. You can adjust your colours on the canvas, which is risky (but fun), or you can prepare your mixtures first on your palette and apply them with any of the following techniques…



Wet in wet

This is one of my favorite techniques but it's also one of the trickiest because the two wet colours mixing together tend to want to lower each other's chroma, muddying them. To combat this I use a layering technique where I paint my dark layer in first, fairly thinly with some painting medium mixed in with it. Then I use a different clean brush for the lighter colour and paint that slightly thicker down into the dark area. I vary my brushstrokes the whole time and the pressure of the brush strokes gets lighter as I move down into the light area. Then I change back to my first brush and paint back up into the light area with the first colour. Then I switch brushes again and work my way down again with the slightly thicker paint of the light colour. Doing all this makes a really interesting textured effect. So if it's an interesting surface texture that you're after, don't be afraid to use your palette knife or your finger or whatever to make that surface as interesting as possible. GlazingGlazing is a good way to keep the chroma of your colours as high as possible. I start out by putting down a thin wash of painting medium over the surface first just to wet it and that will ensure that I don't have any hard edges in the glaze. It usually works better when you are painting a darker colour over a light colour. If you paint a light colour over a dark it tends to go chalky. I tend to use a fine haired brush instead of a bristle brush as I've found this works a lot better when I'm doing glazes. I've used a very thin mix of paint and worked it over the top and then wiping away with a tissue to smooth that edge out. If I let that layer dry and work of the top of that with another glaze we'd really start to see some nice rich colour.



ScumblingScumbling is just using thick dry colour and scrubbing it over the surface of a previously dry layer of paint. When I say that the scumbling paint is thick and dry I just mean that it doesn't have any painting medium mixed in with it - it's straight out of the tube, not mixed with any medium so that's as dry as it's going to get. That allows you when you drag the paint lightly over the top of the dry surface to leave a really broken texture which lets the bottom layer show through. Rubbing BackRubbing back is as simple as the name implies. It can be used at any time while you're painting so long as the previous layer of paint is dry underneath first. So these are four good ways of creating gradations of colour in your painting. There are a few others like stipling, cross hatching and broken colour, and as I said, a big part of your ability to convey convincing light in a painting is going to depend upon how good you are at painting these gradations. Gradations with AcrylicsWhen you're working with acrylics, painting gradations is really tricky because the paint dries so fast so you end up with hard edges to your blends instead of that smooth painterly effect that you're after. For acrylic painters wishing to paint gradations with ease like oil painters I suggest you get yourself a set of Atelier Interactive Acrylics which are as close to the workability of oils as technology has been able to get us so far. Normal acrylics dry with a skin on them and are not reworkable once they have dried. These paints are different - they can be re-activated with water and reworked and



blended even after they have dried thoroughly.

Painting ChallengePaint one 12x16" or similar sized painting of a scene with your main focus being to remember to bend your colours at every opportunity. One really good way to ensure you do this is to not put more than 3 brush strokes down without bending the colour. If you want an extra challenge just make it 2 or even 1 brushstrokes. Good luck!



We all see the world in a different way, not just physically because our eyes and brains are slightly different, but we perceive and experience the world differently. We are 'reality filters' that have been built one piece at a time by our individual experiences. Knowing this it's not surprising that as painters we all express the world differently too, even when we're in a workshop environment painting the very same subject - all our paintings will be different. The beautiful thing about painting is that it gives other people a window into how you perceive your world, so it's a wonderful way to communicate with others and to enrich their own experience of the world by giving them the opportunity to see it anew through your eyes.

What is your visual voice?Your visual voice is your unique expression of your world. It could be called your style, but then it's also what you have to say with that style. More often than not artists are interested in conveying their sense of beauty and so finding their visual voice is simply saying hey this is what I find beautiful and this is the most beautiful way I can think to paint it.

Finding your visual voice. The surest way to find your visual voice is to paint every day. You cannot help but discover your creative individuality by doing this. Serious artists train seriously, just like athletes, just like musicians. They set goals and work towards them. That sounds contrary to the popular concept of the carefree artist but it's entirely true. No mastery was ever achieved without focused and consistent work. The idea of consciously defining my visual voice appeals to me because it gives me parameters to work within and that means focus and direction. Finding your voice is a continual process as your ideas and styles gradually evolve but knowing where you are now and where you want to get to gives you tremendous personal power to achieve those goals.



Here are a few questions to help you define your visual voice. For all the questions place a tick where you currently are and a little love heart for where you would like to be in the future and if those two things happen to coincide then put a tick inside a love heart.

1. Some artists work from internal inspiration alone and other create work based entirely on what they see externally, but most artists lie somewhere in between. Where do draw most of your inspiration from?

Internal External1 2 3 4 5

2. What subjects inspire you the most?

Still Life Landscape Figurative Nonobjective

Note: Many beginner artists complain 'I don't know what to paint!'. Painting things that you know and love is an excellent place to start (and to continue).

3. How realistically do you paint?

Abstract Highly Realistic1 2 3 4 5

4. How tightly do you paint?

Tight Loose1 2 3 4 5 A combination of loose and tight?5. How much detail do you like to paint?

Detailed Broad1 2 3 4 5



6. Do you like to plan your painting or dive right in?

Plan Dive1 2 3 4 5

7. How is your drawing skill? Would that need to improve for you to be able to paint the way you want to?

Poor Excellent1 2 3 4 5

8. What painting elements do you feel are most important in your work? Rank them from 1-5 with 1 being the most important.

__ Line __ Shape __ Value __ Colour __ Texture

9. Do you prefer to paint large or small paintings?

Small Large1 2 3 4 5

10. What would you like to try to warm up for painting?

Small studies / painting exercisesDaily pages (stream of consciousness writing)Setting a painting scheduleMeditation / Prayer / Quiet timePhysical exercise and stretchingListening to musicContemplating your previous workVisualizing your painting



11. What source do you prefer to work from?

From photosFrom lifeFrom sketchesFrom your imagination

12. What Medium do you prefer to work in? Would you like to explore any others?Oils Acrylics Watercolour Pastel Mixed Media

Other_________________

13. Which techniques interest you the most?Wet in WetWet on DryDry media eg. chalk pastel, pencilMixed mediaImpastoThin washesGlazingDribbling / SplatteringTextureCollage (adding 2d objects)Assemblage (adding 3d objects)14. Sum up in one sentence or several descriptive words how you would like to be painting in the future.

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Here's how you get there…

LearningSketch or Paint as often as possibleTake a courseTake a workshopGet personal tuitionJoin a painters groupVisit galleries, shows and museumsSketch or Paint as often as possibleRead painting books and magazinesView work onlineMeditate on your paintingSketch or Paint as often as possible

What stops you from doing any of these things? Make a list and then list ways that you can change or work around these things. eg. Do you have an art space? Do you make the time to paint? Do you lack inspiration?

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SupportNo matter how much we try to ignore it, other people's opinions matter to us, especially with painting. What we all need is positive support for our painting endeavors and constructive criticism. Anyone who ridicules you or your work is costing you enjoyment so you must protect yourself from that sort of negative input. Good non-biased constructive criticism is difficult to find but worth its weight in gold. Learning to critique your own work is critical to good development so adopt a habit of viewing your work in a mirror (or flipping it on the computer) and analyzing it in terms of design, colour, brushwork and realism. Rest assured you will be your harshest critic.



Seize the day! "If you hear a voice within you saying 'You are not a painter' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced"- Vincent Van Gogh.

Source: "Finding Your Visual Voice" by Dakota Mitchell




Demonstrations


Taking elements from the landscape and arranging them into a pleasing composition is one of the benefits of being a plein air painter as opposed to a photographer. When you first begin painting outdoors it’s all you can do to just attempt to paint what you are seeing. The next step, once you get more comfortable, is to gradually become the master of your painting instead of being enslaved by the scene. Make small changes at first because the more you have to invent, the harder it is to achieve a convincing realism as you’ll be relying purely on your memory and imagination - a mere ghost of the real world.

When it comes to inventing things in your scene, whether it’s a figure, a tree, a cloud, lighting or an atmospheric effect, the more you understand of WHY a thing looks like it does, the better able you’ll be to conjure it onto your canvas with your brushy wand. That’s why artists are always working. Whether we’re staring at a high cloud or a face a party we’re always trying to figure out how the light is working to reveal its beauty so wonderfully.



When workshops go bad...



� Small colour studies.



� Darks blocked in.



Student ExampleProblem: The lights have been painted too dark in the trees with no real definition. The cliffs are painted all the same colour and value with no form which is flattening the image.

…after some modifications. By darkening the distant cliffs the front cliff is made to appear brighter. Lighter and thicker lights were applied in the trees and the shapes made more interesting and convincing with a few details here and there to suggest the texture of leaves.



Student Example Problem: The beach’s lines have been interpreted as curves and the vertical spacings exaggerated, changing the perspective and giving the appearance of an elevated viewpoint.

… after some modifications. We often exaggerate the curves in beaches because our brain knows them to be curved, rather than drawing the sharp zig zag shapes that are actually there. Hold your brush out level and perpendicular in front of you and measure the angles of the waterline, waves and bases of rocks and cliffs in order to avoid this common mistake.



The sketch, marking out darks and lights.

The darkest darks blocked in.



The design is for 1/3 light, 2/3 dark. The dark bias really helps the light to have more impact. By lightening and warming the details in the light cliff face a strong glowing light effect can be achieved.

“Hatfields Beach”15x15” Oil on Canvas



In this painting we were concentrating on blocking in large shapes with 3 colours - 2 for the darks and 1 for the lights. Notice the exaggerated atmospheric perspective to give the painting more depth and make it easier to read. When painting the water it’s critical to keep your brush clean in between strokes and to only use one quick stroke for each horizontal sky reflection or else the colour will be muddied.

“Orewa Summer”15x15” Oil on Canvas



Starting with a thin wash of colour, using just paint and walnut oil, then scumbling it with a paper towel to remove any excess oil and loosen up the painting further before I begin. The looser you start a painting the more likely it is you’ll finish in a loose painterly manner.

“Waipu Cove, Autumn”15x15” Oil on Canvas



In this painting we focused on inventing a golden light across the background which required lightening and yellowing everything in the background, more so closer to the sun on the right.

“Morning at Ruakaka Reserve”

15x15” Oil on Canvas



Your rainy day painting challenge

One apple, 20 brushstrokes - each stroke a different colour.

Thanks so much for being part of the workshop. It was great to have you there. I hope it’s given you something to chew over and that you’ll take your painting just that little bit further because of it. The whole world is out there waiting for you to paint it! Enjoy.

Richard Robinson.



workshop handout

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