Painting Theory Poster

Post date: Feb 2, 2014 11:14:31 PM

So, I've only really taught my painting curriculum once and it was last year, annnd it was also with another class. To clarify, I had to teach Painting with my second semester of Drawing and Illustration in order to keep it. This wasn't ideal, and it didn't really work well, but I got to teach the class and I was able to run through some of my curriculum.

What I did notice is that when I did try to break things down and make things easier (or so I thought I was making it easier by breaking it down and separating each technique) for students, I did not actually make things easier. It was a little too tedious and it took too long. I wanted to just have student's know exactly what the basic properties of paint and mixing and brushwork were. It's just hard to give them this, they really have to practice it a lot to actually be able to do it. And then they have to use it in the proper context and so on and so forth.

Well, I had two of these big breakdown projects, one was a color book which was essentially point for point stolen from college color theory. And the other was something I just cobbled together which I called a "brushstroke inventory" it was kind of like a paint handling vocabulary. Like what does dry brush look like, what do regular solid strokes look like, that sort of thing. I did this so that students would use this knowledge and we could sort of better communicate why parts of their painting weren't working.

The color book just didn't work, it was too tedious and it took too long. And the brushstroke inventory did work it just spawned too many questions and nobody seemed to know what they were doing. So for this semester I just combined the two into a set of 15 simple concepts and just called the whole thing "painting theory" which is a slightly made up umbrella term for basic color theory and brush technique. In truth, you do have to understand this stuff and recombine it to use it in a painting and paint with any control. throughout the semester I plan to touch on each of the theories multiple times to reinforce them. Below are a few of the posters that were well made and had each of the fifteen components.