Learning to paint
It’s finally time to learn to paint. We’ve come a long way in this course so far. We’ve gone from drawing our hands and learning about basic forms to learning about color theory and finally making our first painting of the four major forms with black and white acrylic paint.   . When I say “Learning to paint” this isn’t something that can just be learned with one quick lesson. There aren’t really any tricks or shortcuts. If you want to learn to paint you must dedicate yourself to …

How To Paint With Acrylics
Lesson 15
When learning how to paint with acrylics the most important thing is to first understand the properties of the colors (pigments) you have chosen to use. As you learned in Lesson 12 Color Theory Basics the most important factor as to how your paint will perform is dependent upon whether or not it is an opaque color. Opaque Acrylic paints will cover a surface better and avoid streaky transparent colors.  Then you’ve got to make sure you have a nice surface to paint on. You …

Warm and Cool Colors
Lesson 14
Warm and cool colors are important in painting for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that warm colors tend to move forward in space, while cooler colors tend to retreat. This is mainly because of how we experience the world and is pure science. Within the atmosphere there are zillions of little water molecules floating around. The largest of which form clouds and eventually dump rain on us. But the air itself also contains water.  So when we are looking faw away to the …

Analagous Color Scheme
Lesson 13
The next most important part of color theory is harmony.  Color harmony is essentially the art of putting colors together that look good. That’s pretty much it. I’ll keep using the musical metaphors because in music we also have harmony. So think about color harmony in the same way, except visually. When you here a song you can tell if the musicians are all singing in harmony or not, if there’s one person who is out of key then it also throws the others off as well. …

Color Theory Basics
In this Lesson you will learn:
1) What type of paint to buy (Materials)
2) How to control color intensity  (Intensity)
3) How to see the value (shade) of color. (Color Value)
Materials
First things first! It is important that you know how to buy the right paint for what you want to do.
There’s two types of paint. Transparent and Opaque. When you start painting it is HIGHLY recommended that you start by using only opaque colors. This will reduce the possibility of your paintings becoming streaky and dull. Transparent colors can be …

Composition in Painting
Lesson 11:
Up to this point we’ve been focusing on some very basic skills.  And many of the techniques and elements will be learned through practice. However, there is another part of becoming a painter that also requires practice. And that is teaching yourself how to look at, and create compositions within a picture plane.  Your picture plane is simply the area in which you are drawing. It is the shape of your paper, or canvas.  But that rectangle has certain rules regarding how to arrange the elements of …

How To Shade
Continuing our exploration of the elements of drawing/painting now leads us to Value and how to shade. Value is the term we use when referring to how dark or light a shadow is. This is extremely important as we progress towards painting because every color also has a darkness. We will be exploring the value of color in subsequent lessons. This easiest way to understand Value is to think about shading. The “value” is basically how dark the shading is.
Another important thing to remember is that every object …

Drawing Skills: Measuring
Lesson 9
This lesson will deal with learning how to improve your drawing skills by creating a unit of measurement for drawing. You will use your pencil to measure and draw a still life which will be set up in front of you. In the first drawing by Honore Daumier you can see that the practice goes back many hundreds of years. People still use it, because it works.

All you have to do is hold a pencil or brush at arms length, close one eye, and move your thumb …

Drawing Form
Lesson 8
Now that we have got a good grasp of line, and the importance of varying our lines in our drawing we are going to continue on to another huge element of drawing/painting. That important element is form.  Correctly understanding form will give your paintings/drawings more depth. Traditionally schools have taught students to look for four key forms. These are The Cube, The Cylinder, The Sphere,  and variations and combinations of these forms.

Using combinations of these three basic forms can enable to draw virtually anything on the planet. It …

Line Variation
Lesson 7

Line Variation.

Drawing #13 “Line Variation Shoe”

In these drawings you are going to be exploring line variation. It is important that the lines in your drawings have varying thicknesses. Because of its versatility and ability to make highly varied lines we will be using a brush and ink. This will make the drawing appear more lively and dynamic. Later on will start exploring how different line thicknesses can also give a drawing “weight” but for this first drawing just trust your intuition and vary the thickness of your line. …