The Outside Shore
Materials & Techniques
Media
This series of essays explains what you need to know about each of the
various popular painting media. Since most of my experience has been with pastel
and with oil, those are the only essays I have written thus far.
There is one general comment I would like to make. From time to time you will
hear artists talk about materials being "archival", "permanent", "lightfast", or
"acid free". Most materials that one might think of using to produce
art are not inherently permanent. Over time - perhaps a matter of months,
perhaps years, perhaps decades, perhaps centuries - the materials will tend to
physically disintegrate to the work of the acids present in many organic
materials, and the colors will tend to fade with exposure to light. Whether this
happens over the course of just a few months or whether the work will last for
centuries depends largely on the quality of the materials used. Most painting
media have some sort of permanence labeling on them. There is little consistency
from brand to brand or from medium to medium as to what these markings mean,
exactly, but in buying your art supplies, it is worth checking into this if you
care about the longevity of your work. The good news is, more permanent does not
always mean more expensive, at least with paints - the most lightfast pigments
are often cheaper than the less reliable alternatives. More permanent papers do
tend to be more expensive than less permanent ones, however.
Equipment
The equipment involved in painting varies according to the medium, and I will
discuss equipment specific to a given medium in the section dealing with that
medium. In this section I discuss the equipment that is more or less independent
of medium. Basically, that means easels.
Actually, although easels are for the most part independent of medium, there
are some respects in which your medium of choice can affect your easel preference.
For instance, there is the angle at which you will want your painting held.
Watercolorists typically like their paintings held flatter than other artists -
some work completely horizontally, although most have at least some angle. On
the other hand, other watercolorists do work vertically. Pastellists sometimes
like to keep their paintings tilted forwards rather than backwards, so pastel
dust falls immediately away from the painting. Be sure the easel you are
considering is capable of supporting the angle at which you wish to paint.
The most important consideration in choosing an easel, though, is whether you
plan to be using the easel mostly at your home or studio, or if you plan to take
it with you into the field to paint on location to paint en plein air.
Studio painters tend to work larger than plein air painters, and since they
are less concerned with transporting their easels, they often prefer larger,
sturdier easels. I have no particular recommendations to make in this area,
though, as I am almost exclusively a plein air painter. As such, I am greatly
concerned with size and weight.
The standard recommendation for plein air painters is the French easel, which
is a wooden box on folding legs, available in almost identical versions from
several different manufacturers. When set up, the top of the box opens to
support your painting, and a drawer pulls out to allow access to your equipment.
It is a nice idea for a design. My personal feeling is that these boxes tend to
be a lot heavier and bulkier than I would prefer if I am carrying my supplies
any distance at
all, and the space inside ends up being insufficient for a lot of artists - most
end up carrying an additional case or backpack for supplies. You can make it
work if you pack lightly enough, but it does seem a shame to go to all that
trouble and still be stuck with a 15 pound easel.
For my pastel work, I use a variation on this design called
a Russian easel, made by Yarka. The box is smaller on the outside but not much
smaller inside because there is no drawer to take up space, and it weighs only
about half as much as a French easel. The main design difference is that the
painting support is the inside of the lid on the Russian easel, whereas it is
attached the outside of the box on the French easel. Also, the legs are
telescoping aluminum rather than wood.
Another popular choice are the pochade boxes, again available from different
manufacturers but usually with more significant design differences between them.
Like the French or Russian easels, a pochade box contains your supplies, and provides a painting support
(typically in the lid). The box is designed to either be handheld or to mount on a standard
camera tripod. There are usually lots of compartments and attachments, including
space for storage of one or more wet paintings and a palette with wet paint still on
it. The
assumption with most pochade boxes is that you will work quite small - the
painting support is often limited to 9x12" or smaller, whereas a French or Russian easel
can generally take a painting as large as you might actually be tempted to work
on in the field. A popular pochade box is made by Guerilla Painter.
I have used a pochade made by Open Box M that can handle canvases as
large as 16x20", although the storage for wet panels is limited to 11x14" panels.
Besides the fact that it lets me work bigger than other pochade boxes, I like
this one because you do not need to mount the whole box to the tripod - only the the
combination palette and panel holder. This allows the set up to be sturdier with
a lightweight easel. The box that holds the palette / panel holder as well as
your supplies and the wet panel storage unit stays on the ground. Actually, I
never even used the box. Instead, I took the palette / panel holder
and placed it along with my supplies and the wet panel storage unit in a backpack.
There are conceptually similar easels available from Artwork Essentials and
others as well - contraptions you attach to a tripod that hold your painting and
function and as a palette as well, but do not otherwise provide storage.
Eventually, I decided to design and build my own easel along these lines, which I call
The Monarch Ultra-Portable Easel. It provides more working space
than any of these others, while also being lighter and less expensive than most.
Like my old Open Box M, I store it in my backpack along with my supplies. My wet
panels are protected by a wet panel carrier that is
also of my own design; this goes in my backpack too.
Some artists prefer to use lightweight aluminum folding tripod easels
and either hold their palettes in their hands or attach their palettes to their
easels somehow, as with the easels by Sun Eden. These easels tend to not be as
sturdy as the box easels, and they need to be weighted down in the wind. Plus,
you need to figure out a way to protect your palette during transport. But if
you do not mind these limitations, this is probably the lightest weight setup.
Techniques
As I explain in the introduction, painting is for the most part not about
technique per se. That is, the specifics of applying pigment to surface are not
really my concern here. Instead, I wish to talk about general approaches to
painting that many people find useful. Again, most painting techniques are
dependent on the medium, so I will discuss medium-specific techniques in the
sections on the various media. In this section, I concentrate on more general
information of use regardless of your medium.
General Approaches
There are many different approaches to painting, of course, and I am not here
to tell you which is right. I am just going to describe a few approaches
I see a lot of artists use, and you can decide for yourself what works for you.
Big To Small
This is the right approach. OK, I am just kidding - there really is no right
approach. But this works well enough for me that I am making no effort to hide
my preference for it. The idea is, you decide when you start the painting what
the basic composition will be, and then you block that in using either just a
few colors or even one color in different values. I am talking about having
maybe half a dozen big shapes in three different values. You see right from the
beginning how the composition works, and you do not have to spend a lot of time
later trying to fix it. After the initial block-in, you start breaking down
these big shapes into progressively smaller ones, and also expanding on the
initial simple color palette. As you do so, you try to preserve the integrity of
the original design, and not let the subdivision of the shapes destroy the
simplicity of the original. Also, you try to keep the colors harmonious. As you
add a color, you make sure it works with what is already down, or you alter what
is down to make the new color work. Basically, you try to make each stage in the
development of the painting as pleasing as you can.
You can stop whenever you like in this process. Sometimes, I end up with a
painting that I wish I had stopped working on immediately after the initial
block-in, when it was still a simple, pleasing, and mostly abstract design.
Often my favorite stage of a painting is shortly after that, when I am starting
to add more color but still have not broken down the original shapes yet.
Now, to be honest, I know this is not the answer for everyone. If you are not
a representational painter, you may feel no reason to care if the composition is
"right" from the beginning; you may prefer to see it develop during the course
of the painting. If you are a watercolorist, you soon learn that the idea of
breaking up a large shape already painted into smaller ones is easier said than
done - the transparency of watercolor is such that a big blue vaguely
tree-shaped blob is realistically going to always remain a big blue vaguely tree-shaped
blob to some extent, even if you later try to subdivide it into smaller shapes
and refine the outline to make it more recognizable as a tree. However, that
said, there is still value in this approach for abstract painters and for
watercolorists, and I still recommend everyone at least give it a shot.
Top To Bottom
A lot of plein air oil landscape painters seem to favor this approach. You
start at the top of the painting and work your way down. The advantage of this
type of approach for a oil painter is that you are not having to apply several
layers of paint - the first stroke to cover an area of canvas may well be the
last. Plein air oil painters like this because they are otherwise concerned with
not dirtying the colors through mixing on the canvas. Another advantage specific
to landscapes is that the top of the painting usually corresponds to the
background, so you are really working background to foreground. This helps
ensure that the foreground actually reads as being in front of the background.
My main reservation with this approach is that it is difficult to tell until you
are done how the composition will work as a whole. Also, it is hard to judge the
values of areas you are painting without the rest of the painting blocked in for
comparison. In practice, this approach can be combined with the coloring book
approach, below, and if you do a good value sketch first as well, this pretty
much resolves the issues I have.
Coloring Book
In this popular approach, you draw in the composition first with a pencil,
charcoal, or with your medium itself, and then start essentially coloring it in.
You can make the drawing itself as simple or as detailed as you like. Many
artists do a simple drawing to establish the composition and then start breaking
down those big shapes as in the first approach, while others go into much more
detail in the drawing. Watercolorists especially like this approach because it
is so difficult to change a shape already painted; they like being able to draw
it first to be sure it is right. Because watercolor is transparent, you have to
think about whether you want the drawing to show through the finished painting -
if not, simply draw lightly, or erase the drawing afterwards. The primary issue
I have with the coloring book approach has to do, again, with comparing values, but a good value sketch beforehand solves this nicely
as well. So really, when you get down
to it, the only reason I do not use this approach myself is that I am usually
too impatient to do a detailed drawing on my canvas - I want to get right into the painting phase. Doing a small value
sketch first feels like all the preparation I want; then I am ready to see
color!
Puzzle Painting
This is a very interesting approach that is often used to create vignettes -
paintings that are left incomplete around the edges. Imagine the coloring book
approach without the coloring book. You paint a shape, get it right, then move
on to an adjacent shape and do the same. This is really just a generalization of
the top-to-bottom approach where you do not necessarily stop at the top and work
downward. Usually, the painting grows from the middle outward like a jigsaw
puzzle. You can stop wherever you like.
Texture And Edges
While specific techniques for applying paint vary from medium to medium,
there are a few common goals relating to this application that are common to
most artists. The most important to me have to do with texture and edges.
By texture, I mean the surface quality of the painting - how the individual
brushstrokes look together. Some people prefer a smooth appearance, where
individual brushstrokes are not discernable, and others prefer thick
brushstrokes to be clearly visible in the finished painting. Neither is right or
wrong, but most artists would do well to consider the effect they want and try
to achieve it consistently.
What happens often with representational painting is we get wrapped up in
making each thing read right, and unthinkingly apply different brush (or pastel)
techniques in different parts of the painting in this effort. For example, in a
portrait, we might be making tight little circles for the eyes while using long
flowing strokes for the hair, short little strokes for teeth, and so on. In a
landscape, grass might be painted with one type of stroke, the sky with another
type, trees with yet another type (or two). While this is not bad in itself, you
should consider whether you would be better off with a more uniform texture. And
if you do decide that contrast in texture is appropriate - which it often is -
you should consider whether you want that contrast to be determined simply by
the objects in the painting, or whether you wish to exercise more aesthetic
control over this. For example, you might decide you really want the short
choppy strokes on the top of the painting gradually leading to more flowing ones
toward the bottom. Then it becomes your job to figure out how to convincingly
portray a sky using short choppy strokes and the flower bed using long flowing
ones. Or maybe you will decide this is not such a good idea after all. The point is, you
want to be in control of the textures in your painting, and not have them
dictated by the objects depicted.
A related issue has to do with edges. The character of the edge between two
shapes can be an accident of how the shapes were created, but it is almost
certainly be better to take control of this. Sometimes, you might want a hard,
clearly defined, straight edge between shapes, or in the edge between a dark
tabletop and a white wall behind it. Sometimes you might want it hard but
perhaps more of a random zig-zag, as in the edge between a yellow shirt and the
purple bedspread on which it is lying waiting to be folded. Sometimes you might
want it soft, with no obvious boundary separating the two shapes, as in the edge
between the forehead and the bridge of the nose. There are ways with each medium
to affect the appearance of these edges. Usually, it involves attention to
negative shapes - not just painting an object against an already painted
background, but also considering the background as a shape and painting it up to
the object, and going back and forth between the object and the negative shape
it describes.
One particular place these two issues come together is in painting scenes
that include lettering, such as a building with a sign. If you have used one
type of stroke for the rest of the painting, lettering that is just written in
with the brush or pastel will not fit in stylistically - the texture will be
different from that used elsewhere, and the edge may be harder as well. Instead,
it usually makes sense to paint letters as blocks and then cut into them using
the negative space around them. The same is true of small branches on trees, and
in fact the outline of trees in general.
Plein Air Considerations
Because it seems that painting outdoors is an intimidating experience for
many artists, even ones who have been painting for a long time in the studio, I
thought I would share some hints on plein air painting. I should note first that
I have pretty much always been an almost exclusively plein air painter - one of
the things that attracted me to painting in the first place was exploiting the
relationship I have with the outdoors. So to be honest, not having a lot of
experience with studio painting, it is sometimes difficult for me to fully
appreciate the frustration other people can have with plein air painting. What I
am going to share here is what makes the difference between a painting session
that is merely pleasant from one that is the high point of my week. I am not
sure I know how to bridge the gap between horrible and merely pleasant!
As I explained in the section on equipment, plein
air painters tend to be especially concerned with having easily portable easels.
Although you might be painting just a few feet from your car, it is nice to have
the option of being able to paint places where you might be walking a few
hundred yards or more to find a spot, and you do not want to be weighted down
too much. Some artists prefer to leave their equipment in while they wander in
search of a spot - the idea being that you are less likely to settle for the
first thing you see if you are not carrying around a lot of gear. I find if I
pack lightly enough, this is not an issue. My Russian field easel has a shoulder
strap and is light enough that I do not mind carrying it around, and
The Monarch Ultra-Portable Easel I designed fits in a rolling backpack.
It helps, of course, not to bring every art supply you own. As described
elsewhere, in pastel I have been working with a set of just 89
pastels, all of which fit nicely inside my easel. In oil paint, I use a
limited palette of only half a dozen colors. Watercolorists can lighten their load and simplify further if they
wish by using portable sets with colors in pans rather than tubes, although even
if you use tube colors, you can often get by with bringing only your palette loaded
with dried paint and not bringing fresh paint in tubes.
Expect that you will work smaller on location than in the studio. There are
two reasons. One is time - you have only a couple of hours at most to work on a
painting on a sunny day before the sun has moved so much that the scene has
changed. Another reason is that it is easy to be overwhelmed by all that you see
and get sucked into too much detail. Working smaller allows to you to get more
done in a shorter time, while preventing you from getting too involved with
detail. Many plein air painters work in sizes like 9x12" or smaller, although I
personally work quickly and loosely enough that I am just as comfortable working up to
18x24". Most of my work these days is 11x14", but I also paint 8x10" when I want to work
smaller, and 12x16" or 16x20" when I want to work larger.
The sun is also an issue in how you set up. You do not want the sun striking
your painting surface or palette, or else you will have a very hard time judging
values - everything will look too light. Some artists use umbrellas to shield
their easels. To me, that is just one more thing to carry; instead I just
position and angle my easel in such a way that the sun is behind it and hence
does not shine onto my surface. Of course, this leaves me facing the sun, but I
try not to do so directly, and I wear a hat with a wide brim to protect my eyes.
Also, make sure the sun does not shine through your painting if using stretched
canvas.
Even though time is limited when painting outdoors, I personally find a
separate value sketch even more invaluable than at other times. For one thing,
it allows you to see how the composition looks when flattened out on paper,
which is not an issue in the studio because photographs show you that already.
It also allows you to record the light and shadow patterns the way they were
when you started, allowing you to keep from getting confused about this as the
sun moves. I typically spend no more than about five minutes on a sketch but it
probably saves half of my paintings from failure down the road when I start to
lose sight of the big shapes I started with. A quick glance back at my sketch
lets me know where I got off track.
The actual process of painting outdoors is not especially different from
painting indoors, if you limit yourselves to techniques that do not rely on long
drying times such as repeated washes or glazes. For oil painters not used to
working wet-into-wet, this might be the biggest adjustment, especially
considering you probably do not want to have as many different brushes in use as
you might in the studio. Keep your brushes clean, try to get the color
right the first time, and do not fuss around too much with the paint on the
canvas.
Deciding when you are done can also be an issue. Even though you can always
continue working on the painting later (and most plein air painters do), there
is something that feels more final about packing up after a plein air session
versus just leaving your studio with everything still set up. Of course, this is
literally true in one sense - you will not have the actual scene to look at again unless
you come back again at the same time of day with the same weather conditions.
Most likely, the painting will be finished from memory, from your initial
sketch, or from any photos you take at the scene. So when in doubt about how
much to complete on location, concentrate on capturing those things that will be
harder to get right later.
I like to keep the pastels I used on the painting - usually around
a dozen sticks - separated from my main set, so I can easily find those colors
if I want to work on the painting later. My Russian easel has a small
compartment I use for this purpose, but a plastic sandwich bag works well too.
With oil paint, I scrape off my mixtures but leave the squeezed out paint on my
palette, which is protected during transport as part of the
Monarch design.
I find pastel convenient for working outdoors because it cleans up so easily
- no supplies need beyond some water to rinse your hands with (soap can wait
until I get back home). The same is true of watercolor. Most people use toxic
chemicals like turpentine or mineral spirits for cleanup with oil paint, but you
can eliminate these in one of several ways. You can use the newer water-miscible oils,
which clean up with soap and water, or you can use forego brushes and use
palette knives, which wipe clean easily, or you can simply use a vegetable oil
to clean your brushes. I use the same walnut oil I use as a painting medium for
cleanup, and find it works well enough that I do not need solvents. In
any case, be sure to bring a trash bag for used paintings rags, paper towels,
and so forth - you should pack out everything you packed in.
Transporting the finished painting without damage can require forethought -
watercolor may dry almost immediately, but oil will still be wet, and pastel
will always remain fragile. This is especially an issue if you are completing
multiple paintings during one trip. I find I can stack pastels, interleaved with
glassine paper, and clip them together so they do not shift. Oil painters may
wish to purchase a wet panel carrier such as the one
I designed. A pochade box with room for multiple panels handles this problem
nicely, too.
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