I'm a landscape painter living in the UK. I paint the countryside around my home, which, for me, is a place of beauty and pleasure. I love the look of it year round, in every season.
Paint Landscape features posts about my paintings and drawings, and my thoughts about painting. All my paintings are for sale, and you can find them here.
If you take photographs, or paint, or otherwise make images that end up online, take the time to read the article. Not wholly sure of the ramifications as yet, but my spidey sense is tingling, and my knee jerk response to any and all government action is telling me it won't be to my advantage.
Just a year ago I tried to persuade several MEPs that copyright reform is a good thing, and an inevitable consequence of the internet's existence, and that they should vote against ACTA and the whinging of big copyright defenders like the MPAA and RIAA. Now I find myself in the embarrassing position of wondering if I was altogether correct.
Back in the 80s, I spent a while painting houses for a living, and I learnt more about applying paint and making it do what I wanted in that time than at any time before or since.
Which is what painting techniques are all about - making paint do what you want it to do. While making five litres of emulsion stretch to two coats on a living room probably isn't your idea of learning how to paint a masterpiece, don't knock it. There's a story about Ingres taking a group of students to watch a house painter at work, and pointing out how he loaded his brush with just the right amount of paint.
The topic does bring up a point I feel strongly about, which is this: any expertise is hard won. Don't dilute it by hopping merrily from one medium to another, as chance and whim dictate. If you start painting in oils, stick to it until you get somewhere. Don't go haring off to try whatever the latest art magazine fad medium is. Art materials manufacturers, like any other business, are on a mission to make a profit, and one of the ways they do this is by making new products for the amateur painter market, which I suspect is their biggest money earner.
Having said that, and sticking with oil painting because it's what I know - what painting techniques are there? Surprisingly few. To get the image you have in your head onto your canvas, you're probably working over a drawing, whether that's a simple outline or a full tonal rendering. You put on paint, using the hairy end of a brush, because that's the right tool for the job. You're working from dark to light because that's the easy and logical way to go about it. This paint matches the hues and values of your subject. So what else do you need to know?
Paint consistency. Stiff, with the oil soaked out by squeezing your paint out onto paper before using it? Or thinned down to a slippery cream, with an oily medium? Or thinned right out with turpentine, to a watery stain? All these have their place. Just remember to paint fat over lean, with more oil in later layers.
Paint thickness. Thin, smooth layers, or thick impasto? Why not both? The contrast between flat areas and impasto can help define different textures and spaces. And glazes over impasto can get some fancy special effects. Look how Rembrandt handled fabrics and flesh.
Transparency. Glazes can alter hue and value, and add a richness of colour you can't reach with a flat layer of paint.
Opacity. Scumbling can push parts of the painting back in space, or enrich dull colour.
Oiling out. Working over an area by first applying a thin layer of oily medium can help you achieve really subtle modelling when you work into it, especially if you let the oil dry a little and get tacky first, so that it drags the paint off your brush.
Brushwork. The marks you make can contribute to the modelling of forms.
Finger painting. The best blending tool you have is the tip of your finger. Just don't pick your nose afterwards.
Different brushes. A fan brush or blender can blend the edges of different colours or tones. A rigger* can make the fine lines you'll never achieve with a flat or a filbert. Sable, or some artificial blend brushes, give you a smoothness of finish you won't get with hogshair brushes. Just don't go buying 'foliage' brushes, or whatever else some marketing genius came up with.
And none of these things matter at all unless you take pains over every other aspect of your painting: colour, tone, composition, drawing. As with any other skill, when you try to take one aspect of it into consideration, you realize how interconnected it all is. Painting techniques are not a magic solution to painting well. They're more like tools in your toolkit. It's good to have them, and know how, when, and where to use them.
And eventually, after years of painting, they aren't really techniques at all. They're just what you do, without thinking about it, to get the result you want.
* Tom Keating tip: to get really fine lines, lay some varnish, then paint over that with egg tempera, using a sable rigger. The varnish squeezes the tempera thinner as it dries. Personally, I never got that to work without the tempera clumping into little blobs, so I used a dip pen instead.
I've begun a winter landscape, working from three small studies done on location in the depths of the recent winter weather.
And here's a pro tip straight from the front line: if you paint outdoors in cold weather, invest in a good winter coat and some hunting mittens. Eat a good breakfast, dress in layers, and always wear a hat and warm socks. Keep your head and feet warm, and everything else in between should be okay.
Once again I'm cobbling together a single coherent view from several kinds of day. First we had bright and sunny, then we had snow and steel grey skies, and lastly we had the thaw.
Take your pick, is the lesson to draw from this, and given that I took a lot of reference shots I can afford to do just that. So I'm thinking of going for a coming snowstorm/ slightly ominous cloud bank/ dramatically lit trees in the background kind of thing.
I'm currently working on a 12" x 24" board that I think of as a test piece for a 24" x 36" canvas, though it will be highly finished, rather than just a sketch - which brings me to a notion I've been thinking about lately. I was raised on the notion that it's okay to do sketchy, unfinished work. There was always an unspoken notion that this was somehow more 'authentic' than a painting that showed signs of long labour or exactitude. It's only lately I've begun to see how fatuous this is, which is why an increasingly large number of art historical figures are being consigned to my out of favour list.
Constable is safe, despite being criticized in his lifetime for a lack of finish in his paintings. Most of his contemporaries painted in a smooth, layered style that led to a flat, shiny finish, and his occasional broad handling and impasto would have stuck out next to this, but overall he's still tight enough to stay in my good books. The painters I'm beginning to hate are all Impressionists. (I'm a hundred and fifty years out of date. Feels good. I've elected to completely disregard most art done since 1863. I'm also thinking of buying a monocle and a frock coat.)
I've made a rod for my own back with this painting by including too much foreground detail, which will require a lot of close work. Tip #2: never paint anything in a landscape that's less than forty feet away. Not only will you have to slave over foreground details, but you also run the risk of having your painting fail to reconcile the near and distant parts.
There are thousands of art books in print. And you could build
a bonfire with most of them and be better off.
I'm talking about the how-to-paint sort of book which
presumably fills the gaping void left by a standard art college
education.
(On the foundation course I went to, we had a visit from some
scrofulous midget who showed us home made porn videos
and seriously suggested making them was a good way to fund
an art career. Hey, it was the 70s.)
Unfortunately, the people who write most of these books
evidently haven't a clue. Their horrid paintings give you fair
warning on the front cover, but if, despite this, you venture
inside, you'll soon discover the truth: most art instruction
books are written by people who can't paint or draw.
So which art instruction books are worth a look, or better still,
worth adding to your permanent collection? Here's a handful of
the ones I've read over the years that pass muster, and won't
steer you wrong.
Lessons in
Classical Drawing
by Juliette Aristides. This includes a companion DVD, and
has over 200 pages of excellent tuition for anyone who wants
to learn how to draw properly.
Albinus on
Anatomy (Dover Anatomy for Artists)
by Robert Beverly Hale and Terence Coyle. I picked up a
hardback copy of this 18th century classic in The Works for
next to nothing. 200 pages of beautifully detailed etchings of
the bones and musculature of the human body, taken from the
originals by Jan Wandelaar, working for Bernard Siegfried
Albinus. It comes with an essay by Robert Beverly Hale, a
renowned art tutor whose anatomy lectures can still be seen
on YouTube here:
How To Make A
£Iving A$ An Arti$T
, by Colin Ruffell. This offers 12 'Golden Rules' for making a living from your
work, something that never cropped up in the course of my art
education.
Anyone out there got any further recommendations?
There are two temptations you can succumb to when you're drawing or painting. One is that you don't do enough. The other is that you do too much. Both are bad. And the safe place between them can be tiny and hard to find.
I was working on a drawing that wouldn't come together. Even though I'd been careful to work all over the drawing to keep it of a piece, it still looked bitty and the composition tried to fly apart.
I finally got it to look right after three sessions on site. 'One more day and it'll look great,' I told myself. And ruined the whole drawing after twenty minute's work on it the next day.
The moral of this story? Quit while you're ahead. Or be prepared to spend a lot of time putting your mistakes right. 'Maybe if I tried this now...' is a line of thought that can lead to hours of work you didn't plan on doing.
And yet I'm reluctant to offer a one size fits all solution to this particular problem. Sometimes - but only sometimes - it's a good thing to push a drawing or painting past the point where you're guaranteed success. The safe solution can be pretty dull, and exceeding your limits is the only way to grow. At least that's the feel good nonsense I tell myself when I'm wrestling with yet another nosediver.
A wiser head offers this solution: put it away for a while, and do something else. And a while means long enough to forget what the problem was in the first place, before you even look at the painting in question again. Then, analyze what the problem is. When a painting doesn't work, the reason is often this:
When you painted it, you didn't know what you were doing.
Time and distance help you see the flaws more easily, and offer fresh solutions that help you to mend them.
While small, these studies are a bit labour intensive. They also fulfil their intended function of making the skies in my full sized paintings altogether more convincing. I won't be starting any major works without a sky study to fall back on.
by Juliette Aristides. This includes a companion DVD, and
has over 200 pages of excellent tuition for anyone who wants
to learn how to draw properly. 
by Robert Beverly Hale and Terence Coyle. I picked up a
hardback copy of this 18th century classic in The Works for
next to nothing. 200 pages of beautifully detailed etchings of
the bones and musculature of the human body, taken from the
originals by Jan Wandelaar, working for Bernard Siegfried
Albinus. It comes with an essay by Robert Beverly Hale, a
renowned art tutor whose anatomy lectures can still be seen
on YouTube here: 
Again, a great find in The Works, in which the great horse
painter does for the horse what Albinus did for humans. 
, by Colin Ruffell. This offers 12 'Golden Rules' for making a living from your
work, something that never cropped up in the course of my art
education.
Anyone out there got any further recommendations? 