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beggining Painting
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Message
Posted
I. began painting in ernest in 1950 and i chose oils because i admired paintings by someone called Hahn , l think, who worked in oils usung a knife. he painte white houses with gateways giving glimpses of the Med.So i copied him and being poor at that time I couldnt afford a paint knife which were expensive then so I made my own. When i started evening classes everyone was using brushes so I bought some hogs. iin the sixties I moved onto acrylics as well and in 1982 when I retired my daughter gave me watercolours , brushes and a complete sheet of watercolour and I proceded with that very difficult string to my bow which still gives difficulties compared to oils and acrylics . So why do so many start in watercolours when ois ,although smelly and mucky, are a lot easier and even easier than acrylics..? OILS for beginners I say , its the easiest choice i found.......Syd
PS. Beginning painting is a better spelling.
Edited
by SydEdward
Posted
Syd, those of us who have used various media will probably agree that watercolour is the most unforgiving medium. I started at a local art club 20 plus years ago and everyone was using watercolour so I did too. Oil painting was for "real artists" and there was a mystique surrounding it. There were all these things to learn about - mediums, fat over lean, brushes, supports etc plus an esoteric vocabulary - chiaroscuro, sfumato, scumbling, sgraffito....and much more. No, we don't need any of that, we just need to pick up a brush...but at the time it all seems too much. Reading too many books can have a negative effect too..I can still see myself poring over them as if they were recipe books. Looking back now, when I rarely, if ever, use watercolour, I would cut out so much but that's only because I have gained in confidence with DOING.
Watercolour is not messy and easily put away. Oils....not so much..and trying to get marks off something, well....
I totally agree with you Syd that oils and acrylics are much more forgiving, though not necessarily easy to handle. Advice I would give to someone starting out would be....keep it simple, work upwards. Don't over face yourself with advice, just get going. Once you have got the feel of the medium and simplified the process, then you can begin to read around the subject, because then you'll know what you're looking for.
A bit long winded but you get the gist.
Posted
Having always liked painting in school I didn't pick up a brush until I was in my twenties and that was with a cheap watercolour set and, when I think back, some horrible brushes. I then didn't paint much for years and then in the 90's I saw some programmes with Bob Ross (now I know what you all think of him) and thought to myself "I will have a go at this", so bought his paints etc., and did paint a number of things including painting plates, some of which I still have. After a few years, things got in the way and I stopped painting.
Then in 2015 (I was well and truly retired from work by then) I was involved in my WI's annual craft competition and one of the classes was entitled 'Paint a portrait of your love' so I thought I would try and paint again. My hubby asked me (jokingly) if I was going to paint a picture of my phone because I loved it so much but no I thought I would paint my dog, using some old watercolours I had. I really enjoyed doing this although I didn't win and since then I have really caught the painting bug and watercolours are the paints I love, having bought professional colours and no end of brushes. Floral painting is my favourite and I love using hot pressed paper. Agreed watercolour is a difficult medium but I think I'm conquering it and trying to get my own style without copying too much.
Posted
Like most people, I started using powder paint and water at school, on sugar paper. And it had its points, although I was never very good at it.
But I don't count that as when I started painting - I was just doing what I was told to do. And when I did start, just on 50 years ago, it was with oil - I read an article in Look and Learn magazine a few years before, mulled over it for a long while, then finally persuaded the parents to buy me some paints. It would probably have been a George Rowney & Co set of paints, with a few (too small) hog hair brushes, turps, linseed oil or copal oil medium (hard to get now, and not worth it), and orf I jolly well went. Next came acrylic, around the time they first came out, and certainly made by Rowney: Cryla, to be precise, available in a limited range of colours at that time.
Much later, I tried watercolour too, and now paint in all three media.
I think there's some confusion about the use of the word "easy" here: I don't agree at all that oil and acrylic are easier than watercolour - when it goes well, nothing is easier than a watercolour. In theory, what is there to go wrong? In practice - lots; because it doesn't always go well. But then, neither does oil or acrylic - the point is that if a watercolour goes all points South of acceptable, there's not really much you can do with it - you CAN titivate it with gouache, or acrylic, or coloured pencil: you can do a Ray Balkwill on it, and add work with pastel (I wonder if he started working that way because a watercolour went wrong and he was trying to retrieve it?). But you're likely to lose the unique thing about watercolour, its jewel-like transparency, if you do (Ray Balkwill doesn't, but then - how many of us could aspire to his standards?). Whereas with oil and acrylic ..... most of mine, especially acrylics, reach the stage of just God-awful; you look at it and think it'll never, ever make a painting.... it just looks foul.
But of course, you've not finished it yet. You can paint out what displeases you. You can change it totally, which is very hard to do with watercolour. You don't have to worry overmuch about damaging the surface, because you won't usually be working on fragile paper, but on canvas or board. And when you've finished, no one will guess the sweat, the panic, the appalling language, that you expended on it: because your mistakes will be hidden under layers of opaque paint.
My point is, the process you undergo isn't any easier whatever you're using, but the result is easier to manipulate in oil and acrylic, in somewhat different ways and stages. Does that make oil and acrylic easier that watercolour? Don't think so.
But I do agree that oil or acrylic are better for those starting out - or gouache, a much overlooked medium - because while a watercolour either works or doesn't, you can generally bring the others round, however much of a pig's ear you've made of them. And you can even pretend that you intended to paint the horrible mess you started with as essential "groundwork" for your subsequent masterpiece, even when you secretly know that you were just groping towards what on earth it was you were trying to say. Can't do that in watercolour, because other people can see through your paint (and you).
Posted
Three stages of an acrylic: not easy, not easy at all; and stage 3 is perhaps the picture at its most ghastly. I added the white at this stage of course, which I wouldn't have done with a watercolour; but I'd probably have abandoned the w/c at stage 2.
Instead, I persevered, and got to the final stage:
Which I trust you will agree is an improvement. Now - any beginner painter could have got here in acrylic; oil would have been more of a struggle if they didn't know they needed to paint thinly in the early layers and let each layer dry (if they were using this particular method). But as painters yourselves, you'll know that I reached stage 3 and just thought - 'why don't I just take this board, and snap it over my knee, and then take my paint tubes and brushes out into the garden and jump on them until they're a multi-coloured, splintered mess?'. I didn't because I knew I could bring it to completion - but easy? No.... no, easy was not the word.
Posted
Oils don't have to be smelly and messy, odourless mineral spirits have taken away the worst smells for some, but it certainly helps to have a studio where you don't have to put everything away after painting. Leaving a painting, in any medium, on an easel for a few days for one to observe and consider usually results in better ideas for developing and finishing the painting.
Posted
I started reasonably young (12-13 in the early 80s) and oils were definitely for grownups. I used watercolour at first, laying it on thick as I didn't know any better. Years later I discovered gouache at college and used that for a while, but never got into oils or acrylic. Fast forward to 2009 - bought a pound-shop set of oils and a cheap canvas and gave them a whirl, again with no knowledge of the medium so plastered it on (!) Loved oils so read up a bit more and sussed them out and now I wouldn't really use anything else.
Posted
The reddish ground, or imprimatura to use a word which would have infuriated Bloodaxe, just unifies the tones - it gives you a mid-tone, on which you can better judge the lights and darks in relation to it - and some people let their first coat show through in places, but that always looks odd to me. I used always to do this, but have more recently painted directly onto the white of the canvas or board; one of mine that I was passably pleased with (Salt Water Inlet, if anyone is curious enough to look for it) was painted on a white canvas board with no initial wash of colour (I may have another go at that, on a bigger scale, and taking Alan Bickley's advice to break up the line that goes across the painting - for which many thanks).
Some of course say that they get intimidated by the stark white of the canvas and feel the need to subdue it before they can paint - but I think that's really reflecting their uneasiness with getting the tones right, or another way of explaining it. Watercolourists nearly always work on plain white paper, and don't seem to have too much trouble with tones - but then watercolour is a gentler paint than acrylic and oil, and you're usually starting with quite pale tones, working from light to dark, whereas oil and acrylic painters reverse that process; so the reddish ground (which I used in the painting above, except, I think, for the sky area; may have done, can't remember) is helpful to them, but would be a considerable nuisance in watercolour.
I wonder how many painters in opaque media always start with the reddish tone on their canvas? I would guess that the majority do, but it would be interesting to do a survey on the question.
Posted
I have done one oil painting ever. I was 17, found a box of them in the garage that my dad once used, and decided to have a go. I had my dad telling me what to do, but I didn't understand it. I got frustrated and messy and possibly high on the fumes. Finished the painting and never tried oils again. I now think this is down to bad memories - I'm not so messy these days, the fumes are nowhere near as bad and I don't listen to my dad any more - but I am reluctant to try oils again. Oils are hard.
I have lots of acrylic paints. I've done a few paintings I liked out of several and won a commission last year and am waiting to hear about a submission just now. But I don't find acrylics easy either. People have said you can use them like watercolours, but I have watercolours for that kind of painting. I want to use them like acrylics. But I find them really gloopy and sticky, which I realise is because I am a watercolourist and I like my paint nice and runny. But I keep trying because I like the effects and the colours you can achieve, and one day I will get there.
I don't think watercolours are easy, but for me they aren't the hardest. I like the fact that you can use them anywhere, do a five minute painting if you want to, and there is virtually nothing to clear up. I like the fact that you can use them easily with other mediums, like ink or marker pens, and sometimes I do a full pencil drawing and paint over the top, which I suppose is a bit like a grisaille. And being short of space at home they fit nicely inside folders and things.
Kay M
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