Complete Painter: Lessons from the Masters

Oil-based paints are considered the most versatile medium for painters today. But with pigments, oils, and solvents comes the potential danger of toxicity and combustion. Learn how to take proper safety precautions-reading the Safety Data Sheet and product label for each item you buy, ventilating the room where you paint, and properly disposing of hazardous waste.

What are the "must-haves" for your workspace? Learn about necessary supplies, including paper, pencils, additives, brushes, and the six specific tubes of paint you'll need for your first palette. You'll also learn why so many painters rely on the mahl stick-and how to build your own.

Explore your lighting options for both natural and artificial light and learn how they impact your painting, palette, and subject. You'll also learn how to set your paints on the palette to allow for greatest efficiency and flexibility, and how to clean everything at the end of your session with brush cleaners you'll build yourself.

Studying John Singer Sargent's Portrait of Madame X, you'll learn how the placement of the brush in your hand affects the types of strokes you can make. As you test various options with your own brush placement, pressure, speed, and dilutions, you'll experiment with a variety of lines and marks-and examine those of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and many others.

In this lesson, you'll experiment with many ways to change value by changing opacity, hatching, stippling, and more. You'll also learn a variety of ways to create an edge, making it hard or soft. You'll experiment with many different ways to both apply and remove paint, and learn about the relationships between thick and thin layers-and what will stand the test of time.

As you study line, texture, contour, space, and proportion, you'll learn how painters can start with a flat shape and create a three-dimensional solid. By examining Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and other paintings, you'll learn how artists build upon simple geometric figures to create highly organized groupings of interlocking shapes.

With the goal of painting grisailles and brunailles-paintings executed entirely in shades of gray or brown, respectively-you'll learn a step-by-step method for developing two appropriate value scales. In the process, you'll explore paint mixing, assessing the value of those mixtures, identifying and correcting mistakes, and understanding the effects of simultaneous contrast.

Before creating a brunaille based on Norman Lundin's Simple Still Life-Three Cups, you'll learn how to transfer the cartoon files to your surface, as well as options for using the grid system to scale up or down. You'll visually take the painting apart to carefully identify the work's shapes, and then use your value chart to guide you through the painting process.

Learn how value affects the mood of a painting-with a greater range of values bringing higher energy and a smaller range bringing a softer, calmer mood. Explore how value also can create pattern, a focal hierarchy, and the illusion of space and three-dimensional volume. You'll also examine the way light can be used to give a flat effect or to produce greater drama with a chiaroscuro.