You Are in Control of Your Painting's Success!

    You are in control of your painting's success! Really! How can you go wrong? Well, first of all, remember if you do go wrong, know it, and proceed anyway. Why? Because once you learn to analyse where you went wrong, then finishing is how you learn to improve. How can you know how to go right when you went wrong? To give you the most helpful instruction you can receive, the instruction that can make you the excellent painter you want to be, know this: No amount of practice makes perfect!! You need to practice the "right" things otherwise you are spinning your wheels, stuck, instead of traveling down the road to success. Corny I know, but doing things by rote is the best way to ingrain the procedure that will get you the best results every time you paint. To become proficient at painting and to paint successful paintings every time you paint, you have to be very specific in your decision making process in order to see the results you want. And that's the key. You have to know the specific details of what you want before you can get it.

     On July 31, 2013, I posted the six questions you need to ask and decide in order to produce consistently good paintings Look for it in the archives..Once you decide these six elements of your painting, it puts you in control.

     

      After students receive very specific instructions from me on how to plan their paintings, many students do not realize they are to go through this process every time they paint. Doing thumbnails of each answer to questions one through six is the rote learning process that teaches composition and design, concept and execution, so you can assimilate all the nitty gritty treasures used by seasoned, successful painters. You can understand the theory and instructions I provide as solutions to the questions "What do I do next and how do I paint it?"  Understand what each question, 1-6, means, ask it, answer it, thumbnail it, every time, until it is second nature to guide yourself with it and then and only then will you know when, where, and how to utilize the knowledge which can turn you into a skilled painter. Learning what line, form, values, temperature, color scheme, and chroma are, is necessary to handling the myriad of choices you make with every brush stroke. It helps you visualize, color, mood, where the light goes, what value to choose, what color to mix, and how to create integrity that locks all the elements of your painting together, so everything works in your painting. 

       If you want to be a good painter, why would you waste countless destructive hours instilling bad habits that promise bad results, and unhappiness, all because you want to skip answering these six questions and want to skip doing thumbnails, so you can get to the fun part of painting. What's so fun about unhappiness and disappointment? Do it right and make these six decisions, do the thumbnails, and planning becomes the fuel that drives your enthusiasm into painting harmoniously "in the zone", a euphoric place where you have all the answers to produce a great painting, and you do. Happiness is the process and the resulting painting itself,( which came into being because you were in control.of it's success). So, where's your plan? 

The Reprimand

      As to learning the rules, here is the reprimand:

       Even those artists that broke away from the pack to form their own approach to painting, which in turn started a whole new movement and style of painting, were trained artists, and learned the rules. It was the application of the rules in a new manner that set them apart. But, it was the rules that made their paintings work. Even Jackson Pollack knew and used the rules to be "spontaneous". Certainly it can be mind-boggling to be flooded with too many rules all at once. It takes time to layer and absorb the matrix of design and color, accuracy and placement. But art is more than just a feeling, a nuance. It is the ability to say something evocative with a brush. And if you want it to say more than P U, foundation is necessary to build on in order to depart from and stand alone and be good at what you do. So, here are the rules really necessary to enjoy painting and what you have painted. Doing the following is the bare minimum to being happy with your paintings, unless you are simply satisfied with copying.

     Copying photos, copying paintings, the planning is already done for you. Good photos already have everything decided. But if you further understand why they are good in respect to line, value, form, color scheme, chroma, and temperature, you can maintain quality and improve on it. So if pleasure painting is what you seek, what's more pleasurable than being successful? Implementing and understanding this basic process (1-4  listed below) will turn on the mental mechanism within you that will enable you to learn ways to always grow as an artist.  If you follow the rules below, minimally you will be successful now and immediately.

Rules, rules, rules! Here's the bare minimum:

1. Do thumbnails for all your paintings until you are good enough to do them in your head.  That means, good enough to do 3 plans in your head, select and reject, remember your concept and follow it through to the end of your painting.

2.  Learn to move color and light, be aware of it in your planning stage, before you start painting. 

3. Keep your values reduced to under 6 (that includes white) and bump them up or down to make them work!

4. After you plan, please, check yourself, check your placement, check your thumbnails. When you deviate, you learn very little except how to never achieve your goal. If something else occurs to you along the way, don't proceed with your new idea. In other words, if it departs from the line, value, form, chroma, temperature, color scheme you have overall already attended to in your plan: STOP DON'T DO IT, GO BACK TO YOUR THUMBNAILS AND YOUR ORIGINAL PLAN.  If your new idea enhances what you have planned, and maintains it, proceed and finish. Otherwise finish your painting as originally planned, then paint your subject again with your new idea developed into a new plan. You will have 2 great paintings. One is always better, but that is subjective, and an argument for which is which. When you do it over under a new plan and have finished the first plan, you learn how the rules are working!

     You don't have to be a serious painter to plan. You just have to be someone that hopes for something you like when you are done; someone, who wants to enjoy painting and the results. Planning is the only thing that separates you from me, and me and you  from any really great artist.

     For me, I have an irrational driving force within that wants to share the joy of painting, that means it is important to me that you are successful, which means sharing the rules and you learning rules well enough to follow them. There is absolutely no way you can turn out a poor painting if you do this! Success feels great and you will love painting. You'll be sucked into timeless energy as you paint and discover the awe of painting in the zone. You are going to be more than pleased: you'll be happy and regenerated, ready to do it again. Rules. Are you ready?
   If I'm soft in describing or demonstrating process please use the comments box, or email me at ssprigggallery@yahoo.com so I can help and be more clear wherein I have not been successfully teaching you how to plan your painting. There are many mechanisms by which we learn and sometimes I just need to reassert it differently, then rote learning is the key. Do it and do it and then you've got it forever. Take a moment to review July 30, 2013 " How to critique your own work". It explains this minimal process you should always do before you paint.

Demonstration at Loma Linda Cultural Art Association

                                             

                                          Susan Sprigg  Floral Demonstration

From a workshop on differentiating 1 color.

"How to Produce 

Successful Paintings Every Time!"

Loma Linda Senior Center, Loma Linda,  CA

Barton Road and Loma Linda Drive  (by the fire station)

September 8, 2013 - 2:00 to 4:00 P.M.

About the Artist: 

Susan Sprigg entered Commercial Art freelancing newspaper, and magazine advertisement art at 26 in the late 70's doing artwork for her regular client base illustrating shoes, clothing, portraiture, furniture, architectural housing renderings and the like. She also did album and book covers and illustration. She was the illustrator for Manning Silver Design, a fabulous and very exclusive clothing designer in Beverly Hills.  She then became Art Director in the 80's for a major national manufacturer (before the internet and it was so easy to be recognized nationally) COAST, where she designed and sculpted prototype figurines and other products for Hong Kong manufacture and U.S. and international sale. As art director she was head of Advertising and the annual 132 page catalog of merchandise, so she arranged for models, was responsible for concept and design, oversaw the photo shoots, and launched ad campaigns at a time of typesetters, and paste up and doing everything manually or by extremely expensive color process. Correcting color manually, prescribing the inks used and the percentages of change was a wonderful education in itself, in learning to see color, tweak it and learning how chroma sets mood and can elevate the subject matter.

    In 2002, Susan entered the world of fine art, and oil painting, after working in a huge variety of mediums for years. She is know for her portraiture, roses, and her ability to instruct. She now instructs privately and publicly, sells her paintings on the internet and  her daily Art in Ebay auctions under the headings Daily Paintings, Direct from the Artist,  and Susan Sprigg oil paintings. 

    

  You are also invited to subscribe to Susan Sprigg's blog at http://susanspriggdailyartweekly.blogspot.com  for free instruction, class notes and lectures, painting critiques and more. She also has just started to post her auctions and latest work for sale. Please join, this blog too!  http://susanspriggpaintings.blogspot.com

Understanding the Nuance of Painting

      An email conversation with a contemporary of mine has stimulated me to  pass on some of it's content to those of you who desire to reach your full potential as artists. Not everyone is thusly driven. And even though this may show you another side of me and my aggressive side of teaching, I think some of today's content can be beneficial if you can look past my reprimanding manner.

        Rules. Sometimes it may seem like there are too many rules. A clinical approach to painting and  creating any kind of art may be a huge turn off. And as I have shared with many of you before, in my youth I was very puffed up and impressed with my own ability. But I learned that the devil was in the details and those details would be overlooked if I didn't give into the fact that I wasn't above learning procedure and needing to apply rules in order to make a  successful original piece of artwork on my own. I was great at copying but terrible at my own composition. I would do the work and always crop down. I couldn't see it until the work was done. I wasted time , material and money, cropping and remounting work in the beginning of my art career.

   

       Youth told me two out of four efforts wasn't bad having to crop. But as soon as I gave into planning, learning composition and as many rules as I could, it was a shortcut to 100% success without timely cropping and remounting.

      Teaching, I see so many artists not take the time to understand composition and  proper use of thumbnails. They commit to working diligently on  a poorly planned painting that needs lots of fixing that will take twice the time and produce 1/2 the product potential. This all happens because they did not take even fifteen minutes to do thumbnails and answer six basic aspects of the painting they were about to produce. What's my line, color scheme, chroma, values, temperature, and form, are the basics. Mastering the basics first is the only way to understand the nuance of painting. It is the magic you see when a seasoned artist paints with mastery. They don't skip this part!  They have done the planning so many times that they refine planning to in their head or they examine their subject prior to setting up and plan in advance, or they use one of the many mental templates of design they have been successful with in their past, BUT THEY NEVER SKIP THUMBNAIL PLANNING! Minimally it is done in their visual mind. So take time to plan and learn so the FUN can be in the details instead of dread and dissatisfaction and hardship.

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The Andrew Loomas Color Wheel and 3,2,1 Light Meets 1, 2,3 Shadow!

         My foundation as a commercial artist in advertising, and being an art director prepared me for painting fine art by familiarizing me with color formula and how to render form through process. Seeing color was easy for me, reproducing it, playing with it became easy too. I owe it to learning 4 color process, doing manual color separations, and 4 color camera separations and color correcting them manually. Oil Painter and Colorist Kevin McPherson promotes a simple palette of primaries plus white to learn oil painting and to plein air paint.  I am encouraging you to understand how light and shadow functions in printing the same as it does it in painting as a primer to painting form. 

cyan (blue or C)       Magenta (M)               Yellow (Y)                  Black (K)       

        We used the Andrew Loomas Color Wheel in Commercial Art because we used the 4 color printing process: cyan (blue), magenta, yellow, and black or CMYK.

         This particular color wheel was superbly designed to show 10 values for each primary and secondary on the wheel, from white to black, with 4 tints and 4 tones. I have shared this Andrew Loomas color wheel with you because it explains tint and tone, halftones, the influence of black on a color. (Remember I most frequently use a mixture of burnt umber and ultramarine blue which makes a black, and I produce the same results as this wheel). It will help you learn to create dimensionality, and help you learn how to paint  believable shadow. 

       Andrew Loomas shows us how an incremental addition of white moves us to white, and the color you get adding an incremental amount of black moves the color to complete representation of absence of light. If you added one more outer ring on this wheel it would be black in every position of the outer ring.

        We reproduced almost all colors with these 4 inks. The pure ink color for each primary is found on either side of the line dividing tint from tone.  The tint side is pure, the tone side has a percentage of black added making it a tone. Both tone and tints are called halftones. And halftones are created by lessening the degree of color saturation and by adding black to the mix to create form. We revealed form with these 4 colors in dots. dpi, or dots per square inch, which meant the highest concentration of any of the 4 colors would fill a square inch with solid color by printing that many dots to create maximum saturation. 

        The number and size of dots influenced the sharpness of the detail in that printed image. The less dots printed of the total dpi, the less intense the color since the unprinted dots equated to white  when printed on a white sheet or page of paper. We also thought in tone, tint and halftone. Tint meant how close the dots were together in the absence of black. Tone meant how close the dots were printed together with the addition of black dots. In painting, currently, it is popular to drop the notion of tint and refer to all gradations as tone.  But try to think of "tone" as an abbreviation for halftone instead. If you can train yourself to think in terms of tint halftones and tone halftones and memorize the order in which light meets shadow your ability to paint with take a big leap forward.

       Tint halftones are the family of light. Tone halftones are the family of shadow. In printing 4 color process, the absence of ink dots represents white. In printing, the family of light's most intensity of color is called the local color, is the total dpi being printed to make a solid color and for our purposes of understanding how form is revealed, is position #3 in the light halftone family.

       In 4 color process, the inks are transparent, so the colors change as the different inks are overprinted. It also matters which order the inks are printed. So yellow over blue produces a slightly different green than blue printed over yellow, and this is represented on this wheel. To mix oils by this chart you would just slightly increase one of the contributing 2 colors to acheive a similar result, since oil paint is opaque.

      Position #3 represents to us the strongest intensity in the family of light. As the color dots space out the color de-intensifies. This is the family of light's halftone or family-of-light order position 2. In the spacing of the dots, the color mixes with the appearance of white or non-printed space of the dpi to form a tint. Now as the color intensity lessens in the #2 light-family halftone order position, the room between dots is increased. It is in this position #2 of the halftone family, that we start to show reflected light, by adding adjacent color to the halftone, as dots continue to decrease. To show form, not only does the intensity of color decrease as the form's surface changes, moving away from the light source, but colors from the surrounding objects should be added  to the objects adjacent to one another, mating them, to reveal form by making light appear reflected on your surfaces. After doing this, we move to position #1 in the light family where, colors are neutralized and we are ready to add shadow. As color reduces and neutralizes, we reach the number one classification of order.

     

      Tint halftone (light family) 3-2-1, is (1) Local Color of an objects' highest intensity of color meets (2) diluted local color and diluted reflected color meets (3) diluted colors neutralized,(opposite colors added).Tint halftone (light family) 321 now meets 123 shadow family or shadow halftone. Remember although I'm explaining 4-color offset printing, the absence of dots equals white, and the dilution of color, as it applies to mixing paint to paint form. In other words, at the point of highest intensity of light on a surface we start with pure local color, move away from light as the angle of light changes from 90 degree angle of  light-to-surface, by adding white and reflected color. Then, the next step is to neutralize the faded intensity by adding opposite colors to the mix, and now we are ready to introduce shadow. 

       Shadow follows the 3-2-1 order of light with a 1-2-3 order of the shadow family where position #1 of light becomes neutralised color and changes to shadow family position #1 with the introduction of black. Next we have position #2 which is more reflected color in  an increasing quantity of black, and position 3 is Black in it's most dense representation of the darkest dark of that particular shadow. 

       A word about black: I have been insistent that we mix our black. The reason is to create color continuity in our paintings by decreasing or increasing intensities of the colors used to create black, warming and cooling the black and controlling black's severity. The mix we use to make black is made up of colors in our palette and it harmonized with the other colors we have mixed by having the same constituent parts, appearing elsewhere in our painting. Black is so powerful, it is difficult to ration your usage as a novice painter.  Lamp black or ivory black can quickly doom a novice's painting. So please don't close your mind to me or this color wheel based on me saying don't use black. We use black, only we mix it. So in your mind, substitute the black on this wheel with our mixed black. See the dividing line for the light family separating it from the shadow family. You can use this wheel to learn to tone and tint color, for reference until you teach yourself to warm up and cool off color, reflect color and neutralize color. Then there is pantone you can use for color formula too. 

        Pantone is a color chart system to identify the local color of an object. Each color on this chart gives a formula for the percentages of  the 4 inks to make this color. I liked using this pantone system because I was already familiar with it, and it taught me to see separate color in a conglomerate color. To me pigment is pigment when mixing color. Of course how that pigment is suspended or bound influences an artist when reaching a color solution, but I hold that the formulas translate. More about the ease of pantone later. Once you learn to see and translate color and understand tint, tone, light family and shadow family, you won't need color wheels, or color formulas for reference, unless you are duplicating, copying, or forging and precision is paramount.

Ready for the Next Leap in your painting Ability?

Familiarize Yourself with these Terms to Think and Paint in These Terms.

 Color: Without light, there is no color. Color is manifest by light shining on a surface. Light reflected on a surface is how we see form and color. Light reveals color. Color reveals form. The closer an object is to the light source the more intense the color of the object becomes.

Province of Light is all areas hit directly by light. Remember color is revealed by light. The more direct the light is that shines on a surface the more intense it's color becomes. The most intense area of color on an object or group of objects is at the point 90 degrees to it's the light source that is,not blocked by any objects. There is only one 90 degree point to the light source, color dilutes from that direct point and the result is the means by which we see form.

 

Province of Shadow is all areas not hit directly by light.   Shadow is neither form nor color.  Shadow is darkness.  Shadow is more or less black and opaque.  Light is obscured by an object and casts a shadow – more or less black and opaque.  The shadow is illuminated only by light reflected off the surrounding objects.  Therefore the surrounding object's colors are seen in the province of shadow.

Form or Shape:  By virtue of shadow all natural objects are revealed.  Objects without

shadow are a flat glare of light and color, but when the shadow appears the object takes

form.

 

Local Color is the color of the object without shadow.  Local color does not reveal an object's shape or form.  Only shadow can do that.

 

Hard Shadow:  If the edges of an object are sharp then the shadow's edge is acute (on the object itself). 

 

Soft Shadow:  If the edges of an object are rounded then the edges of the shadow are

softened (on the object itself).

 

Halftone is the change in local color as it becomes less influenced by light hitting the object surface at 90°.  It is an object's mid-value, more specifically, where light is diffused and meets with the shadow, and that which describes form and shape. Tones divide in two groups, into light halftones and shadow half tones.

 

Halftones belonging to the Province of Light are  halftones that carry an impression of

texture and color.  Paint them them brighter than they appear.

Halftones belonging to the Province of Shadow are Halftones that carry an impression of form and should be made much darker than they appear to be, in otherwords reduce the number of gradations of tone by painting fewer tones and making the tone darker.

Tint:  Local color. See our special color wheel by Andrew Loomas and examine the spectrum as it relates to light (white plus local color) and again as it relates to shadow Black plus local color.

 

Light Family is identified by texture, quality, or type of light and color. The order of appearance of light:

 

Highlight and local color                     Tint and reflection                 Neutralized Halftone.

        3                                                  2                                          1              
(increasing the mixture of white as it meets the shadow family meeting it's halftone, reflections and deeper shadow.)

 

Shadow Family is  identified by form and solidity. The order of appearance of shadow is from light to dark shadow:

 

Halftone                     Reflection                   Shadow

1                                  2                                  3