Impossible Shape Painting

Original material inspired by Mrs. Tiffany Fox. Her resources can be found here

A few acrylic painting tips:

Keep your brush water clean! Dirty water makes for dirty colors. It’s a good habit to get into that when you can’t see through the water anymore (it looks like cream soup) dump it out and get fresh water.
Keep the paint out of the ferrule and brushes clean
Keep a cloth handy to dry off the brush once it is cleaned. If there is water left in the brush the colors will be runny.
This stuff dries fast! Make sure to let an area dry completely before trying to paint over it again (if trying to correct a mistake). Acrylic dries from the top down and sometimes it will appear dry but when another layer is added the paint from underneath will “lift” causing a white area because the new paint is pulling up the half dry paint underneath. This also happens if an area is overworked too long before moving on.

Impossible shape painting

this will be painted on a 20x20cm piece of card.

prepare your surface by priming with gesso
select your colour scheme - you are to use a secondary or tertiary colour and its complement.
Use a large brush to paint in your background colour [don't make it flat - if using purple mix the red and blue on the board to show texture and depth]
Tape large contour line version of the impossible shape on top of the board(with transfer paper in between with graphite side facing down if using transfer paper) so it stays put while you transfer image.
Using colored pencil (so you can clearly see what you have transferred) press fairly hard and trace the impossible shape image onto the board (use rulers to keep lines nice and straight).
Use a printed shaded Impossible Shape Reference to use while you paint as a reference of where the correct values and transitions need to be. This is an optical illusion so it can be tricky to look at as you paint it.

- break the shape up into 4 arrow shapes - each one of these is a tint and shade value scale in your chosen hue [refer to the image on the left]
- make a note of how you made the original hue as you will need to make the same colour each lesson

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