Evening Painting and Drawing (Julian Ashton Art School)
This ten-week course on Monday/Thursday evenings at the Julian Ashton Art School offers a progression of exercises for beginning to advanced students. The course is primarily practical but includes basic instruction in colour and light. For more detail on the theory and practice of colour and light for painters this course can be supplemented with the Colour, Light and Vision holiday workshop.
Students new to oil painting follow a series of exercises progressing from greyscale painting copies and still life paintings to colour mixing instruction and then colour painting copies and still lives. In addition a model poses for warm-up drawings followed by a long pose held for the 10-week term, suitable for painting and extended drawings. For class dates and enrollment information, please see this page.
Photographs from Term 4, 2014:
Materials (painters)
- Loose canvas pinned to board for painting exercises. Can be purchased off roll from school, or from bins of scraps at Parker's.
- Brushes in good condition and a wide range of sizes; include some flat, soft hair brushes.
- Glass or wooden palette (preferably not white), palette knife and dipper. Wooden palettes need to be sealed with some linseed oil before using.
- Odourless solvent and linseed oil.
- Rags (preferably) or paper towels for cleaning.
- Oil paints: any basic selection, for example: permanent rose, any bright yellow and red, phthalo blue GS (green shade), phthalo green YS (yellow shade), and possibly ultramarine or a violet, plus yellow ochre, raw umber, white and a black (I prefer Winsor & Newton Charcoal Grey, or otherwise Ivory Black). Student grade paints (especially Winton) not recommended.
- Acrylic paint and a large flat brush for toning grounds, for example Matisse Carbon Grey (a good value 5 grey when painted on opaquely) or Raw Umber (painted on thinly or mixed with white to a middle to light value).
Miscellaneous links mentioned in class:
Slides from first class on Munsell dimensions (zip file)
Robert Henri on brushstrokes (zip file)
Interactive Munsell exercise
http://munsellcolor.webnode.pt/a2-5y-v-c/
Pigment Database. Click on a colour to got to pigment information listed by pigment code.
Compilation of out-of-copyright books on painting, colour etc., available for free download:
http://www.artiscreation.com/books.html
My page on colour mixing in paints
http://www.huevaluechroma.com/063.php
For an outline of the sequence of basic painting exercises leading up to figure painting please seem my pdf for my NAS class: OPWCL2014.pdf (0.67 mb).
