Classes Notes: Painting Drapery

I confess, I have had a bias against "drapery" - probably from the tedious hours of drapery rendering that we did in college painting.  ZZZzzzzzzz.

And when there are so many other fun things to paint -  drapery, for its own sake seems SO prosaic.
But, when a student made the request - I figured it was time.  In my on-line research I found: "The secrets to painting drapery" (it is still a secret),  "How to make elegant drapery",  "Understanding Drapery", etc, etc.
This is all good stuff but I can't believe "drapery" is so much different than anything else 3 dimensional that we are trying to communicate on a 2 dimensional plane.
It has to be about shapes.
The top/red drape is my first demo and I started with a Sharpie sketch to organize the big shapes.
It was hard. It was fun.
After class I began to look at books for painted drapery - classical and otherwise and when I pulled out a book on Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel- a light went on. I am sure that sounds pretentious . . . what can I say.
But, his drapery is so bold, so simple, so understandable.
It makes sense, that a sculptor would paint drapery that was oh, so readable, and not tight or bogged down with minutiae.
This photo, from the book by Lucinda Hawkins Collinge & Annabel Ricketts, is what we studied in class.
I can't say we came up with any secrets to painting drapery but just looking at work from a master made a big difference. We all did stronger work in the second week.  It seemed to make real sense.
My second demo is the green one and even in its unfinished state it has more volume.
Thanks Michelangelo.

Class Notes: The Shape of Things

In this last class session we focused on elements of the landscape in preparation for the transition to painting out doors. (That class session starts on Tuesday night, July 16).
We spent a couple of weeks on trees, tree shapes, clouds and cloud shapes  and tho' we are working with good reference material  it is not like plugging the right numerals into the example math problem - that never worked for me anyway.  We do not copy the reference exactly any more than we would try to paint exactly what we see in the landscape. What's to do?
It's all in the shapes.  In every segment of the landscape: trees, water, river, mountains, clouds -  what we are practicing is good shapes.   Students skimp on the design of shapes, preferring to focus on materials or exotic techniques and wonder why the outcome is so unsatisfying. Books discuss the painting process but never explain that inelegant SHAPES make for paintings of the same.
I encourage my students to be designer first; be design driven, not image driven.  Principles of good design were revered by the ancients and foundational to the "old masters".  A casual viewer may simply admire a painting for it's image content, but a devoted student must see beyond the image to the elements of good design that make a painting work.   But I digress. . .
Our class time has not been in vain, if what we come away with is the simple idea that trees are shapes, clouds are shapes - and all parts of the landscape must be subject to the design eye.
For beginners this may sound like Greek - but start by creating beautiful shapes. To the viewer it may be a group of trees, a distant mountain,  the sky, or a winding river or path -  but to the painter they are carefully crafted SHAPES; beautiful for their having been designed with intent.
For every shape included in your painting- stop and ask yourself:
 is that shape - elegant, sophisticated, beautiful?

Class Notes: Seeing the Shapes of Things

Snow has finally come to Southern Colorado - see last week's post. We got plenty of cold as well - our temps last week went down to 30 below ZERO - which kept my husband from riding his bike to work (zero is his cut off temperature), and definitely kept me out of the landscape. Though the San Luis Valley is at high altitude the surrounding mountain ranges have, so far, kept most of the snow from getting in; but not today. We have been hit with a storm that closed roads into the valley and closed businesses. It is hard to imagine an early Spring in our neck of the woods, no matter what they say in Punxsutauwney.
So last week, the very night our temps hit the basement, I ventured out in the blistering wind and cold to teach an evening class that my husband predicted would be all no shows. He had just ridden in from the afternoon commute.
Thankfully, non of my students ride a bike to class.

So what will induce people to leave a warm hearth and go out when the bottom of the thermometer has dropped out?
I don't know. I do know how much better I feel afterwards.

These four photos follow our class exercise that served 2 good purposes - I like that.
First, seeing SHAPE, and second using MORE paint.
The first sketch shows our little set up of pears and oranges broken down into the SHAPES of form shadows and cast shadows and I encouraged students to squint in order to see only the big shapes, not every nuance of reflected light and shadow. Click on the photos to see them larger.
In the second sketch I have numbered all the shapes. There are 13 in all and after outlining and counting them we mixed paint: one light pile and one dark pile for each color - or in this case, a light and dark for the pears and the same for the oranges - BIG piles. If you are doing this - don't be stingy with the paint.
Photo 3 shows how we used the paint to fill in each of the numbered shapes- in ONE stroke. Yes, you will have to tweedle the brush abit, but it''s fun; thirteen shapes, thirteen strokes.
This encourages discipline in the brushwork and keeps us from making RANDOM strokes; you know, the ones that scream "I'm lost".
In the final photo I have taken the liberty of softening the edges, adding some reflected light and highlights - hopefully, all with the same sense of restraint.

This is a fun exercise. Set up something simple, put a lamp on it and try it for yourself.

And finally- a great quote: "When you go out to paint try to forget what object you have before you - a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it emerges as your own naive impression of the scene before you." Claude Monet.