Miscellaneous Exercises

This Part is a collection of exercises not directly related to one of the program Parts.

Colour

The knowledge and ability to accurately determine the value and colour of a shape is a requirement for most painters. Value and temperature are critical to figurative painters and landscape painters in particular to give a sense of space or distance. Take a piece of card or paper that is neutral gray, midway in value and temperature between black and white. Place this card next to a coloured object.

Decide if the object is lighter or darker in value than the reference card. Reducing the amount of light until both are almost invisible helps. This can be done at night by turning down lights or at anytime by squinting. At low light intensities, the colour-receptive cone cells in the retina cease operating and the rod cells which determine only intensity or vale, take over.
Decide whether the object is warmer or cooler in temperature than the card.

Modify colours in the following manner. Take red, blue and yellow, put them out in their brightest form (purest or highest chroma). Lighten them, darken them and grey them. Tint, shade and tone, is the correct terminology for this (see the glossary in our website). Discover your own way of doing this. You might consider using the compliment of each hue for a starting point. try using black and white. Make some charts or use scraps of paper to perform your tests. You may want to keep them as reference pieces.
What is your personal colour preference? Do like warm colours as opposed to cool colours, neutralized colours as opposed to high chroma (pure) colours? Do you have a preference for transparent or opaque colours?

If you have to, experiment until you can answer these questions. Make a list of the final colour choices.
List the minimum number of colours that will allow you through your technique, a full range of expression. This of course implies good knowledge of the mixing properties of this colour palette.

Experiment with the composition or arrangement of and colours. These can be quick informal studies on paper.

Do several and find out what is pleasing to you and what is not.
For an existing work that is unsatisfying, make a pile of black and white copies, either from photocopying directly or using an intermediary process such as digital photography to capture the image. Try colouring the copies with different colour arrangements until a satisfactory one is found.

If atmosphere in paintings is important to you, try exploring colour relationships and note, for example, what colour/value evokes what mood. Decide how you want to use it in your paintings.

Content

When seeking to understand how to represent thematic elements such as rocks and water, study the work of prominent painters both by reading how-to books and analyzing their work. Recreate either directly or derivatively with your own style, these aspects of their work.
Sometimes, you have to ask of a painting made from a reference image – is it really a painting? The issue arises because our field of vision is much wider than a painting usually encompasses. Often, our response to a scene is based on assimilation of the entire field and no small area can capture the sense of it. Often too, our response is coloured by past experience and emotion that cannot be captured on paper. It can save you a lot of time and effort when you can say of a scene,” this is really beautiful and there is no picture here.”
Portrait and still life painters as well as abstract works with dominant central objects, have to deal with the problem of background. If this is problematic for you, explore various backgrounds. It may be helpful to study the work of others who have painted subject matter similar to your own, or perhaps in other genres. See how they use analogous and complementary colour next to parts of the central figure. See how the use value and temperature change. We're not talking about the semantic content of the background, i.e. that's a door or that's a table, but the design characteristics which you have studied - shape, line, direction, balance, colour properties, etc.
Line up the 5 -10 pieces of recent work chronologically (this often does not matter when we are in an exploratory phase). See if you can extract common themes, common characteristics that you like - and also dislike since we learn from the later. See if you can distill this into a one or two sentence expression of your content - of what you feel your work is about and where it wants to go.

Design and Composition

In a series of simple paintings, explore the concept of spatial depth in landscape using a shape or object of choice such as a rock. Note that turning a painting 90 degrees allows you to view it as a horizontal or vertical placement.

Place two identical rocks, one above the other (use a template or stencil to make it easy. Make the colour of the upper rock softer or more neutral than the lower. Colour is neutralized by diluting the paint with white (or in watercolour just water) and black to tone it down. See what happens visually.
Next, either repeat but switch the colour between the two or simply rotate the first painting 180 degrees. See what happens visually.
In a second painting, place the two rocks side by side with the same vertical placement, and repeat the colour variation. See what happens visually. Rocks will appear on the same plane if the bottoms of them line up.
Next, use the side by side arrangements. In one, make the edges of one rock softer than the other while keeping the colour the same. You can control this by choice of dry brush and wet-in-wet techniques. Observe what happens to the rocks spatially.
Now, keeping the values of the two rocks the same as much as possible, warm one up and cool the other down. One way would be to add red to the paint mixture for one and blue for the other. An alternative (probably easier) would be paint them identically; then, put a transparent wash of a light orange-red over one and a light blue-green over the other (these compliments have the greatest temperature contrast). Observe the spatial effect of this process.

If you want to use text in your work, explore how one composes textual elements and pictorial elements into a coherent and unified visual product. Text is used to create visual texture or single letters can be used as abstract elements. Decide if the meaning of the text is relevant or irrelevant.

An issue to consider is which is more important, the text or the pictorial elements. Is one used to extend, to describe, to modify or support the other? What is the overall message you wish to convey?
Experiment with the composition or arrangement of and shapes. These can be quick informal studies on paper.

Do several and find out what is pleasing to you and what is not.
For an existing work that is unsatisfying, make a pile of black and white copies, either from photocopying directly or using an intermediary process such as digital photography to capture the image. With a black marker, alter, add and remove (white paint) shapes and their arrangements until a satisfactory one is found.

If spatial depth seems to be a recurring issue, take a work that is particularly problematic.

Analyze it and estimate its spatial depth. Write down the factors that contribute to it or detract from it.
Make a separate list of characteristics or corrections that may increase the depths.
Finally, repaint the scene with what you learned creating one with mush greater depth if possible. Discuss what you discovered and how should dealt with it at the next meeting.

Drawing

The ability to easily and accurately perceive and execute angles is important when realistic figurative elements are created in a painting. With a pencil or brush in hand, choose any object, even a photo, and start creating the image with strokes. Start with where you see a line change direction, and stop when it changes again. The lines do not have to meet. Confirm your mark with a ruler or pencil and check the accuracy of your line (the leader will demo this).

Process

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