Painting Lessons

I took an acrylic painting course offered by the Smithsonian Associates. It was a six week course, offered on Friday from 6-9. I gotta say, I don't do well with night classes. Scrambling after work is tiresome enough lead on the need for a long attention span for three hours was brutal. I am proud of myself for completing the course. We had a very attentive instructor, who teaches us experience instead of theory. Six lessons will not be enough time to teach newly starting students everything they need to know about painting. Instead, our instructor told us some of tricks one can do during painting that we will eventually understand once our experiences in painting accumulate.

I was talking about my painting experiences with some of my friends, whom label his way of teaching quite arrogant, due to his inability to talk theory. Their arguments do sound legitimate. An instructor does have to offer factual knowledge in order to convince students of his expertise. However, within a short period of time (18 hours of teaching) on top of the awkward time of day, students are less likely to obtain much factual information.

Even through I wasn't able to fully understand some of the lessons I have learned from my instructor, but I believe that once I have done more paintings and became frustrated with certain failures, I will appreciate what my instructor has told me.

Still Life - Fruit Basket

The class at the Smithsonian for beginners in Acrylic painting has taught me a different perspective on painting. It's more than just looking at something and putting paint onto a canvas. It's about observing the color, shades, and lights that falls on an object in order for it to look three-dimensional. Coming from a science background, it is a new thing to observe colors and objects around me in this way. We were working on a still life in class the other day, and I just cannot get the draperies right. I can observe that there is a strong harsh line between the shades and the light, but when transferred on canvas, it just doesn't quite do it for me. My instructor told me that there is a blurring area in between the two harsh boundaries, but I really have trouble internalizing this information. Unfortunately I ran out of time on working on this piece in class, I will have to do some additional work on this before calling it complete.

An Oil Painting

When I was in Rehoboth beach, DE, I encountered many art stores and galleries. Most of them are oil paintings, even through I was actively looking for acrylics. One of the oil paintings really strike my fancy. It was a painting of a water town. I was overwhelmed with the subtle detail, color, and composition of the painting. I wouldn't say this painting was extremely detailed, but it included enough detail for the viewers' eye to wonder around. I would call it a colorful painting, but it was mostly through the use of brown, blue, and red. In terms of composition, the deep alley down in the middle gives the viewer a sense of depth, space, and reality. The asymmetrical sides and lighting composed by the building makes this painting more interesting, avoiding the sense dullness that symmetrical paintings would create. I am not sure if I can recreate this with acrylic. It seems to me that the blending techniques were used a lot in this painting, which is easy for oil but difficult for acrylics.

Half finished painting

I did not forget about my painting hobby.

Medium: Acrylic.

I painted this one day when I was under major stress. Those stress were accumulated mostly due to overbearing promises I have made to others and my obligation to keep my words. I wanted to paint something as practice to blending. For acrylic paints, I find blending a quite difficult technique to master. It is true that you can blend with additional water, but the amount of water on the brush is hard to control. Furthermore, based on how dry the paints are, the flexibility of blending varies. 

My inspiration for this painting coming from my deep desire to be in large cities. Living in Bethesda and Washington, D.C. has made me crave for the skyscrapers and gray clouds. It might be more or less obvious that this painting was paint over an older one. I was not entirely satisfied with the older painting, due to incomplete understanding in natural color and lighting, and painting over an older less satisfactory painting is a perfect way to destroy evidence for my past failure. The reason why this painting is a half finished painting is only because I think there are more adjustments I can make to make this more realistic looking. And how exactly I will do to achieve this, is yet unknown to me.

Tulips

My first time trying acrylic painting at VisArt workshop in Rockville, MD was a blast. The class was on a saturday from 2pm to 5pm. Before I started the class, I was dwelling around downtown Rockville. The red-bricked streets and the close proximity of restaurants and shops reminded me of downtown Bethesda, vibrating a very modern yet rural feel. My major discovery was BonChon (korean fried chicken that is slightly different from American fried chicken) on Gibbs Street. The town center of Rockville is a big square plaza surrounded by 3-4 story-tall early modern offices and shops. It had a stage set up with chairs and tables, seemed to be getting ready for a performance.

I was early for my class, so I was able to do a little chit-chat with our instructor of the day Mark Collins. At the beginning of the class, Mark tried not to give us lectures but instead pointers on color and brush techniques. Apparently to make a color darker, you have to mix with the opposite color on the color wheel, instead of just mixing the color black. We were painting a field of tulips with a windmill. I had major problems with the clouds. Often times painted something good and have no idea how I did that. But after 3 hours of battle, I was finally able to whip up a painting that is recognizable. I think this is a good start on my painting career. My next project will perhaps be Albert Bierstadt's Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Minimalism

Althrough it is a bit late to advertise for this event, but this weekend at Bethesda is the Bethesda Fine Arts Festival! This event last through the weekend: Saturday May 19th 10am to 6pm, and Sunday May 20th 10am to 5pm.

The media provided for those fine arts varies from Jewelry, sculpture, to paint or clothing and fiber. As a beginner in acrylic painting, I am more interested in the painting booth that will be available. There are some impressionist, still-lifes, landscapes, but no minimalists. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed.  Minimalistic paintings can be very easy home accessories, and are good products for home owners to decorate the walls of their homes.

Minimalism is a movement in post-modern art that people either love or hate. The emphasis on minimalistic paintings can be described by Ad Reinhardt's "more is less, less is more". Minimalism raised to react against abstract expressionism, against the flattening images of the 3-dimensional world on a 2-dimensional world. The simplicity of plain paint, perhaps in combination with  another shades of color make make a beautiful work of art yet convey meaning. For people who do not understand art as much, minimalistic paintings serve as easy home decor that cannot go wrong. In the 21st century, minimalism has already silently occupied the leading artistic trends. Kate Spade, famous fashion designer, uses geometric shapes in simple and contrasting colors to create a modern New-York feel for her products. Minimalistic architecture, more specifically interior design, now go for minimal embellishments and usage of dual-functional furnitures for space. In digital design, editors tend to go for a less busy appearance, usually with a single button on a blank screen as the start of their projects. Advertisements now go for symbols and at most a two-lined messages in the middle of the poster for the visual appearance.

Perhaps the current trend of favoring minimalism is in correlation to the raising demand for space and efficiency. However, the idea of minimalism in itself is being adopted in the minds of designers as trendy styles.

Can you tell an acrylic painting from an oil painting?

After some research on starting out oil painting, I have came upon the opinion of acrylic painting. They are pretty similar to beginners. They both require brushes and pastels, both can paint the same kind of landscape that I am interested in. Except, some major difference once you get into the actual painting process.

Oil paints takes a long time to dry. By "a long time", I mean a day or two. And it makes sense. If you poor a drop of oil and a drop of water on a counter top, which one would dry faster? Of course the water drop. And because of the slow evaporation rate, it is much easier to mix colors with oil. You can attend the oil painting after an hour or two to change some clouds, mount ranges, etc. and make it appear as if there were the original artist's intention. As a result, oil paints are much more blended. If you see an oil painting with no sharp edges throughout, chances are the painting is oil. Acrylic, on the other hand, dries very fast (one or two hours). Acrylics are water based. From a typical acrylic painting of landscape, you can see very distinctive lights and shadows, with minimal blend between different shads of colors.

The picture above is by one of my favorite artist Leonid Afremov, called two couples. This is a typical palette knife acrylic painting, as a good example of the sharp edges of knife strokes of acrylic paintings.

As a chance to advertise a good Smithsonian program: The smithsonian associates. They are starting a 6-session evening introduction class on oil painting starting July 10th, 2014 at 6:30pm. Concurrently, a 6-session evening introduction class on acrylic painting starting July 11th, 2014 at 6:00pm.

See you there.

Beginners in painting: Paint and Wine

Do you want to try out oil or acrylic painting? But don't know where to start?
Are you overwhelmed with the unfamiliar supplies you have to get in order to attend an oil painting class?
Or do you just want to get an idea of the just of oil painting?

These are my questions when I first started seriously thinking about oil painting. I looked online about the prices of oil painting classes, supplies to get, ideal locations to oil paint etc. They do not seem ideal for a recent graduate who's working full time and occasionally working on weekends. Painting classes usually cost in the hundreds for four or five classes, quite pricy. Some oil paints are toxic and should be used in well ventilated areas, so a small bedroom in an apartment does not sound good.

My problems were solved when I was browsing on group on for some discounted restaurants. They have the so called "paint and wine" activity where you can go to a local bar with some friends, and paint a pre-designed canvas with provided supplies. Sounds like a good idea huh? You can get familiar with supplies used, try and see what painting is like, and you get to drink and socialize.

The place I found on Groupon is called PaintNite, which currently offers half price off sessions until June 2014. If you are around the MD-DC-VA area, you should go and try it out.