Terry Miura Challenge - Final

"Red Light Green Light"

Painting is 18x18x1.5" - Linen

I had fun with this. Each car has it's own personality and shape. As much as I wanted to leave more abstract shapes, I feel that I went a little too far on the cars. This was a great learning experience for me, and I enjoyed keeping it SIMPLE. I try to do this with all my paintings by starting each shape with only two values, and going from there. It is like a building block. Or as I say to my students, start with the silver dollar, on top of that put the fifty cent piece, then the quarter, and only if it is necessary, add more detail. Detail should be only the last 5% of a painting at most.....

Be sure to go to http://terrymiura.blogspot.com/ to check out the rest of the entries for this challenge. Terry is one of the best blogger's out there because he shares his thought process in a very honest and generous way. Much for you to learn on this site. And Terry, let's do this again soon!

Small Daily Studies

 Painting Demo Sketch

A few years back I participated in the 50 paintings in 50 days show at the 20th Street Gallery in Midtown, for 3 years in a row. I submitted to the show because I wanted to learn to paint small and I did, but I learned so much more than that. As I painted each day I began to simplify the painting, and I noticed that my brush strokes were looser and more direct. I was getting more comfortable with my tools, and most of all I learned to discipline myself to focus on painting regularly. But in addition to that, when I went back to larger paintings, I was able to use the things I learned - things like value, shapes, and color. Over all it was very beneficial in a lot of ways.

This week in my beginning oil painting classes at the School of Light and Color in Old Fair Oaks, California, we have begun a new series of studies. I decided last week that this would be a great way for new painters to practice painting small while at the same time learning about - you guessed it - simple value shapes, shadow and light, color mixing and color harmony. My hope is that this will improve every body's confidence because when you paint one small painting in each class, you will have to put together the steps that I have been teaching and still have time to finish a painting while the inspiration is fresh.

So I asked everybody to bring in a small object that they felt inspired to paint, and we put a light on it right next to their easels. Then we used our view finders to crop and compose some beautiful shapes and shadows and light. Not much time to get over-involved, just paint. Everybody did a great job today.

Next week we will paint the same object with white and black paint only. I will teach them to mix a value scale and work from that. After Thanksgiving week, we will do a complementary color scheme using only two complements and black and white. Maybe after that do it again using analogous colors or something like that, very fun!

Color Mixing &Value Workshop This Week

These past couple of weeks we have been learning about color and value in the beginning oil painting classes at the School of Light and Color.

I was surprised and delighted that these students were more than willing to use their class time to make charts. I have a wonderful group of students both on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday mornings at the school. These students want to do the work in order to learn. I know it's tough to come into a class as a beginner, especially when we feel that everybody else knows more than we do. But if you can take that risk  and show up, you find out that we are all students, and eventually we figure out that it is a lifetime journey and not a quick study. I love it when one of the gals or guys fall in love with the process, and after getting through the initial stunning fact that it isn't as easy as they thought, become willing to take on the challenge. It is so exciting to see that look on their faces as they light up with an "Aha" moment. 

Anyway, back to the exercises. We drew some one inch squares and put the complements on either side. It is surprising what you can learn by doing simple exercises like mixing complementary colors to make beautiful grays. We mixed the a little of one complement into the other, then a little more, then half and half. It was also interesting to begin to mix white into these mixes where the beautiful grays began to emerge.

We talked about the importance of using grays in your painting, and that it is also important to use value to state a predominant - middle and little value design in your paintings.

Then we made value charts using color, first using black and white to light and darken, and the other using analogous (colors next to our main color on the color wheel) colors to keep as much chroma (rich color) in our mixes as possible.

We talked how to use value changes to turn a form and how value and color are dependent on what you are comparing it to. We squinted to see our values.

After that we made a value scale in black and white, then found paint colors from the tube and matched the value on the scale. After using tube color, we used mixes and found the value using the same scale.

I believe these exercises are invaluable....because we actually learn from DOING. It's all fine to read about this stuff in the art books and magazines, but we will miss the connection if you don't actually do the work. Also, we will learn more from making mistakes than if we don't make mistakes. So we were freed up to make them!

My hope is that when these students are painting their next painting they will reach for a color/value on the palette, and not just think in color alone. They will begin to see value and color all around them. It is not easy but I'm hoping that they will begin to group smaller shapes into larger value shapes, and then begin to design a painting using these concepts. It will take time, and we can only learn so much at a time, so sometime in the next 6 months we probably do this all over again.