GIVING BIRTH TO A PAINTING

PAINTING SURFACES: SMOOTH VS IMPASTO (TEXTURED)

  The painting message communicates well when color, form and brush techniques enhance one another. Expressing 3-dimensionality with tonal blends, learning to smoothly blend light and dark contrasts together is part of the painters' craftsmanship. Reality is the canvas goal, illusion that it is.

  Like the watercolor practice compositions Skill 1, Skill 2, and Skill 3, learning brush techniques to effect appearance with opaque media is also important. Only the medium is different.

  The purpose in these practice skills was to experience brush color blending and the look and feel of texture, or "impasto" (thick, heavy application) painting. Where smooth, brush painted color delights in its realism, the rough, craggy, thick display of broken color applied with palette knives or wooden popsicle sticks, which we used, offers excitement you want to touch.

  The left, flat apple has only 1 dimension as if cut from construction paper. The center one has soft blends, having roundness and light contrasts the first is missing. The right apple has thickness, broken color, hard blend edges and rough character. Each style has its own purpose.

PRACTICES WITH STICKS AND STROKES

  Palette knives are excellent tools for texture painting, and when they were beyond our budget, craft sticks substituted very well. To achieve an impasto like effect, the stick when scraped on the painting surface, divides the paint stroke in half (left) pushing the color to the right and left along its center. We painted color over color, allowing the mixing strokes to blend at will, controlling them with additional applications or removing the unwanted. Allowing paint to dry between layers permits the undercolor to show through the scrapings and builds up the depth of the impasto.

  The images on this page were practice skills. Again, "layering" was the painting method employed. Impasto can begin with a smooth base color with texturing applied over the dried layer. Below is a demo which shows the layer method. In this case, all color was mixed directly on the manila paper in 3 layers.

  This practice sequence begins with a white and brown base application as in "A". White was applied first, and the brown scraped in. Layer one.

  In "B" touches of black were added to form a brown/gray mix. More white kept the gray a light intensity. Red was added to warm up the brown hue and all was left to dry. Layer two.

  The final layer, "C", began with additions of brown, black and touches of purple along both sides. Black was lightly dropped into the middle to form bark imperfections, and white was streaked finely for added height. The wet paint was scraped to stretch more paint lines and suggest rough bark texture. Additions of purple were added last completing the trunk.

  The scraping and dragging of paint creates the "broken color". No smooth blends here, but patches and bumps that appeal to the touch. The thicker the tempera paint, the higher the rise on the surface. Be careful, though---too thick and the tempera many have fine cracks when dried. Acrylic is the better paint to use for impasto if its available for you.