Just Pick 2

Here’s an idea I came across recently that I thought you might like. It’s a way of getting around ‘painter’s block’ which is a bit like writer’s block, only worse! This is when you just don’t know what to paint, or how. And it strikes every artist every now and again.
So here’s what you can do to get those creative juices flowing again. Pick a subject – any subject. It doesn’t really matter what. It could be a landscape, a photograph, an object from your house, just anything. And then think about how you can draw or paint it using just two from the following list: line, tone (value), colour, texture, atmosphere, blocking in solid colour, using different materials.

So for instance, paint a vase concentrating on using lines and textures; or paint a landscape using just blocked in solid colours and tones. This will force you to look at, think about and paint the subject in an entirely different way to usual and should undo that creative block.

Painting Ideas Webpage

Have you had a look at the Painting Ideas page on my website yet? I'm slowly adding new ideas to it, and have just put on a couple of websites that you might like to visit. One is the Painters Online site that is run by the UK magazines The Artist and Leisure Painter, and the other site is a gallery with lots of video content. I think you'll find both of them interesting!

Wildlife Artist of the Year

Do you want the chance to win £10,000? Then why not try your hand at painting a wildlife subject for the 2009 Wildlife Artist of the Year competition. For more information visit http://www.wildlifeartistoftheyear.org/index_2009.html

The Zorn Palette

I recently came across what is known as the Zorn palette, which consists of just yellow ochre, cadmium red, ivory black and white. Now whether Anders Zorn ever used this palette of colours is debatable, but it has been attributed to him. (Anders Zorn (1860-1920) was possibly Sweden’s best known artist and he specialised in painting portraits and nudes. I have used one of his charcoal sketches as inspiration for one of the projects in my online drawing course).

So I thought I’d have a go at using these four oil colours, but actually had a bit of trouble getting any kind of blue out of the ivory black. The theory is that by placing a grey made from the black and white next to an orange made from the red, yellow and white, the orange will make the grey look bluish. This is because the eye picks up the orange and then ‘invents’ the complementary blue colour. However I just couldn’t get it to work. I just got grey!

But this got me thinking about just using three colours for painting (plus white if you are using oils or acrylics). There’s an American oil painter called Kevin MacPherson who paints outdoors a lot, and uses just cadmium red, Cadmium yellow, ultramarine blue and white, and with these he creates every colour he could possibly need, and all with great harmony!
So why not pare down your paints to just these four and have a go at mixing everything else. See what you can come up with.