Tips for Improving Your Paintings
Treasure Chest
Today I’m participating in a collaborative online project with other art bloggers. We are re-posting one of our favorite posts from our blogs. I chose to re-post some notes from art school from way back when, because I find these tips personally useful to review every so often, especially this year when I am exploring various other avenues in my creative process. Perhaps other artists will find some of these tips helpful, too.
I also recommend that you view the post from the organizer of this project, Seth Apter, on his blog The Altered Page. It’s a gorgeous, compelling and inspiring piece.
You can link to all participating artists from the Treasure Chest post on Seth’s blog.
Finally, the piece above is a brand new work called “Alien Gate,” a 9″x12″ mixed media painting on watercolor paper, part of my new series, Paintings from the Hot, Hot Summer of 2009. So here’s my Buried Treasure:
Class notes from art camp classes with George Liebert and Dan Gustin, Oxbow, MI, summer 1991.
Make a list of verbs and adjectives about your own work.
When struggling with a work, isolate parts of it and do lots of sketches to come up with a better composition.
What are your personal, specific goals?
Colors: similar vs. somber vs. stronger.
Realism vs. abstraction – both successful, maybe in combination.
Consider excitement of surfaces vs. complex images. Patterns on blanket, individual parts developed, keep to whole color – add pink, red, clear blue, zingier color.
Keep exciting in earlier stages.
Develop through series of big changes to work out issues.
Series of patterns; sincerity, passion.
Beware of making shadows that are a hole to hell (i.e., too dark) – gap in thinking color rather than value.
Take inventory – look at beautiful drawings in museum.
Strange mix of sacred and profane.
Baroque art: look at Poussin, Rubens’ sketches, Rembrandt, make drawings about what interests you — movement, etc.
Overlap some things.
Check a variety of approaches; work on sense of design.
Look at Eric Fischl – palette in realistic landscape.
I enjoyed looking at this list, it made me think,
Really interesting to read these tips. They are really grounding and offer a lot of useful info. Thanks for participating in the hunt!!
Ginny and Seth, Glad you found these interesting. And thanks, Seth, for organizing the Buried Treasure. Great idea!
Good tips there. Thanks for sharing them.
thank you for re-posting your notes … definitely some great ideas in there.