I couldn’t have had a more perfect day today. I rode my bike to painting class with the sun warming my skin, then got to sit outside and paint on the patio of Emily Carr overlooking the harbor. It was such a postcard moment. Beautiful!

What we learned in class today was awesome too – glaze! I can’t believe I never knew about this stuff. This will change the way I paint in so many ways it makes me do a happy dance. If you’ve never used medium or gel before, here’s a brief rundown of what you can do with it:

• brush it over your finished painting to give it a glossy or matte finish
• add some medium to your paint to get thinner more translucent colors
• add it to your paint to build up layers increasing depth, capturing light
• go over areas with an different color glaze to warm it up, cool it down, increase the intensity etc.

I think my favorite use will be for highlights. I went over some of my previous homework paintings dry brushing white highlights, then going over again with a color glaze so the light looks more like it’s coming from within, glowing. No band-aid effect!

Our class assignment was to sit on the patio overlooking the water and paint something plien d’air using only black and white paint. We were told to use a variety of brush strokes to establish depth and give weight to different areas, then to use some color glazes as the final touch.

Once our class time was over Lisa said it was OK for us to stay and continue painting if we wanted, so me and one other student hung out on the patio in the sun for another hour or so finishing up our pieces. What a beautiful day! This is how mine turned out:

When I walked in the door and John asked me how my class went, I really wasn’t exaggerating when I replied, “Life changing.”

I would’ve liked more time to re-do my homework painting, but once I got to class and started talking to the other students, I discovered that my problems with the scooping technique were not unique to me. Lisa’s official criticism was pretty much what I had learned on my own – keep the palette clean and separate, no more than 3 or 4 brush strokes at a time, then clean the brush. Try scooping just 2 colors if it’s getting muddy and plan well enough that you don’t have to go back over what you’ve already painted. She said my technique was good and seemed happy, reminding me that the point of these paintings is to learn the technique. Painters rarely use one single technique to paint an entire painting, rather using a combination for different areas.

Today’s class went super fast, right from the minute we started we were painting. You pretty much need to be there and get your paints set up early, get your water, so you’re ready to go as soon as the clock officially strikes class time. We painted the whole class, no more color theory! Well, technically we did mix blacks today (huge PITA with my crappy paints that have too much white in them to ever really go black),but then we used those blacks right away to paint a gradient background for something we’re going to put together next class.

There was a big still life scene set up in the middle of the room with several different objects on it. Today’s lessons were using different techniques to paint different objects using our red, yellow, blue color palette. The first object I painted was a tall wine bottle using a watery, translucent technique almost like watercolors. I had to keep really watering down my blues and greys to get the right highlights and shadows without appearing too heavy. Next I did a teapot using only my palette knife. That is a lot tougher than it looks and took quite some getting used to. I stuck mostly with blues for that one and found it interesting, but not anything I’d want to do again if I didn’t absolutely have to. It’s so hard to control where the paint is going with the palette knife and it gets so chunky…not for me.

Next up – the loaded brush again, this time all blacks and darks. We were allowed a bit of color with the alizarin crimson, but I had a tough time trying to load up a brush with different shades of black and get an identifiable object out of it. I was trying to paint a rubber glove and I think it looks more like a big black blob. So tough to identify where the fingers are when you’re painting with pretty much all black. This one will definitely need some more explanation and some examples before I grasp it.

The two I didn’t finish are my homework assignments for the week – one object in all white using repetitive brush work (dots, squares, lines, whatever but ONLY your whatever) and a dry brushed object in neutrals. Next class we’re going to cut out all of our different objects and then move them around the background so we can play with the concepts of visual weight and composition.

As we painted the background today, a table draped in fabric, I realized how tough it is to just paint a blanket laying on a table. Doing the individual folds and details, getting the depth when there are no objects…tough! I hope there will come a day when I can paint things from sight with ease.

The big lesson we’re working on is learning how visual weight is affected by the colors we choose and by the texture we use in our paintings. Bright, full chroma colors (those on the outside of the color wheel) don’t look natural so they really pop. They look heavy. Dark colors too and dark areas in a painting. Using more neutral, diminished colors gives the subject a lighter feel. The analogy Lisa used here is a painting of a feather and an anvil. If the feather is in bright primary colors like yellow, red and blue and the anvil is in muted diminished greys and neutrals, the feather will appear heavier, even though our brain knows that’s not true.

I think the texture part is common sense – heavy texture, thick brush strokes give more visual weight. It was fun to really play with this to the extreme though.

I’m looking forward to practicing all of these techniques and then playing around with our composition and placement more. I’ve already learned so many things I want to try in my own paintings. Yay!

After I finished my homework painting from the first class, I caved and bought all new paints. I went for the cheaper student grade of paint, which Lisa (my instructor) said was fine for the purposes of this class, but did recommend that we invest in good paint if we wanted to continue. She told us a story in the first class of a student of hers who had painted a large painting several years ago while she was still in school. She had it hanging in her living room until one day her little boy kicked a ball smack right into it. The paint shattered and fell to the floor. Can you imagine? Spending hours on a painting, carting it around for years, having it lovingly framed and hanging in your living room until one day all of the paint just falls off? Brutal!

She’d mentioned too that the cheaper paints have white in them, so when we’re mixing our colors, it might be tougher for us to get the real rich dark shades that the people with professional paints were getting. I was cool with this & figured just having the right colors would be a huge leap from last week. I was wrong.

Our entire first class and part of the second class consisted of making a color chart showing our reds, yellows, blues and the diminished shades. I was amazed at the difference when I would try to mix my crappy Liquitex BASICS brand alizarin crimson and Pebeo High Viscosity Studio cadmium yellow medium. I’m not sure if it was one or both, but I kept getting muddy pastel shades instead of the dark, rich shades of my neighbor. Finally Lisa came over and squirted a dab of Stevenson Professional cad yellow mid on my palette and the mixing went much better.

I couldn’t afford to replace my new paints with professional ones by the third class, but I definitely wanted to. We were mixing blacks using lemon yellow, alizarin crimson and phthalo blue. My paints refused to budge from grey. It did look a lot darker on the paper than it did on the palette, but again, I was seeing how the cheaper pigments can affect your painting. Pebeo brand lemon yellow? Has a crapload of white in it.

One last knock on my cheap paints – they seem to suck right across the board. I bought Daler Rowney acrylics in hookers green, phthalo blue and ultramarine blue just to mix up the brands and see if I could determine a winner. After only using them for 2 weeks, the lids on the Daler Rowney tubes won’t close. The threads get full of paint, that makes the twisting of the lid go a little wonky and the whole lid breaks inside so you don’t get a tight seal. You don’t get any seal! Seriously flawed design.

The Second Class

Back to class 2 – we painted! I assumed the classes would be mostly theory and then we’d have to go home to apply what we’d learned and do the actual painting at home. I was delighted to discover I’d have to get my hands dirty and dust off my courage so I could paint in front of everyone else. My class is not made up of intimidating hipsters or anything like that; we’re actually a pretty diverse group of folks ranging from early 20s to late 50s. About half have taken classes before at Emily Carr and nobody seems particularly confident in their abilities. Everyone seems happy to be there and excited to learn and play. Awesome! And still, a little nerve wracking. Sure, I’ve been creating stuff for a while now, but I don’t show it off to anyone until it’s finished. And if I have to throw it out and start over? Nobody sees that! Painting elbow to elbow is a whole ‘nother level.

This kind of stuff is why I’m so glad I’m taking a class. I like to paint my girls or little creatures. And there I was, Sunday afternoon painting a still life scene. We had very specific instructions as to the technique to use to paint the still life and the point of the exercise was to work on the technique more than make a recognizable image of a still life. Lisa set up a little table draped with fabric and some fruit. We were to use our hookers green for the underpainting, then paint in the darks and lights using a very limited palette of hookers green mixed with alizarin crimson and a bit of blue and yellow. We worked on moving very quickly, abstractly, blending the brushstrokes and scumbling. I thought I was doing pretty well, working on the dark shapes of the apples and blending the background until I saw Lisa’s painting. In about a tenth of the amount of time I’d taken, she’d finished a great representation of the apples with bright highlights and bold shadows. Mine was so blendy blendy and not nearly bold enough with the shading.

That’s the great part about class – I don’t need to paint a pretty picture; I don’t have to be afraid of making it ugly. I’m looking forward to trying to that exercise again and being bolder. Even too bold would be better than too dull!

Homework

Homework for the second class was to do another still life, this time using a paint scooping technique. It was the opposite of the scumbled blending we’d just done. Long bold brush strokes with no blending allowed. We were to take 2 or 3 different colors on each scoop and somehow make that look like our subject, again using a limited color palette of just one third of our color chart. So if I wanted to use yellows, I could use yellows, purples and all the neutrals between them, but nothing in reds or blues.

I ended up getting a wicked cold last week and spent most of my days in bed with a cold cloth on my forehead and Kleenex shoved up my nose. I didn’t get a chance to tackle the homework until Saturday night and boy do I wish I’d started sooner! That scooping technique is fun, but definitely NOT natural for me. I kept wanting to blend it in or go back and change things. As soon as I did (and I did, I couldn’t help myself) it ruins the effect. My colors got muddy. I scraped right through to the underpainting. My palette was a mess of pastels and browns instead of the crisp clear colors she wanted.

Our instructions were to use some of the same colors in the foreground that were in the subject, but not the same intensity, muted. I think I took this to heart too much and ended up with a muddy looking painting with way too much of the same colors everywhere.

Her other tip was to be careful to not repeat brushstrokes in areas we didn’t want to draw attention to, like the background. Whenever you’ve got 3 or 4 of the exact same brushstroke, it stands out as a “pay attention to me!” part of the painting.

I’ve always done things a little backwards, so going back to school in the middle of summer when everybody else is out playing is quite fitting. I started my first class (acrylic painting techniques) on June 22^nd, 2008 at the Emily Carr Institute (now reclassified as an official university). It’s a beautiful space on Granville Island and once again, I feel strongly that I am meant to be here.

Ever since I moved to Vancouver, I’ve felt more alive, happier, more ME. It took only a few days before this city felt like home and over a year later, I still catch myself smiling as I gaze at the mountains lit up by the sunset, glowing snow caps behind the skyscrapers and I feel so lucky to live here. It really is an incredibly beautiful city.

The classes, so far, have been fantastic. My instructor is Lisa Birke, a working artist who is teaching over the summer. She’s teaching 8 classes, actually. Busy lady! Anyway, let’s start at the beginning…

Originally uploaded by jiblite

Gotta Have the Right Tools

Going over the materials list for class, I tried to make do with as much stuff as I already had. I had some of my own paints already, some from James (my landlord and good friend) and a bunch of brushes. Masking tape? Check. Bucket for water? Check. Disposable paper palette? I can do you one better; I have a glass palette! Turns out that “disposable” part wasn’t just to save money on the student budget, but was actually important. 15 students all crowding around a sink at the end of class trying to clean their brushes, water dishes AND 15 palettes? Not a good idea. So I picked up a pack of paper palettes by the 2^nd class.

The paints were another miscalculation on my part. The materials list says, and I quote, “At least 10 tubes basic acrylic paint – suggested colors: lemon yellow, mid yellow cad, azo red light” and so on. I took “suggested” literally and brought an assortment of 10 colors. I made sure I had a couple of yellows, reds and so on, but if I had cadmium yellow light instead of mid, I assumed that would be fine. I even picked up a cheapo Selectrum package of 20 different small tubes of paint. I should’ve been golden!

Originally uploaded by €eErRbBbiiIEe€

Turns out that “suggested” meant EXACTLY. The entire course is based on working from Lisa’s color palette created using those exact colors. I muddled through the first class and at least half the class went down to Opus during the break to buy new paint. Since just buying the class materials was already coming out of our grocery budget this month, I figured I would try to make do with what I had.

First Class Fear

The first class felt a little intimidating because we just jumped right in. Since I’m mostly self-taught (vaguely remember some stuff from high school, and then a couple of mixed media classes in my 20s), I hoped we would start right from the beginning. Is my brush too dry? Too wet? Should I clean my water more often? Should I sketch an outline first? Am I mixing the paint on the palette correctly? I wanted assurance that the way I had been doing things was not totally wrong and/or really stupid. I was sure that there were going to be some big reveals that would later make me shudder that I had ever _________ (washed my brushes with dish soap, stored them upright, painted the entire background first, whatever!).

We dove right into color theory working from a specific palette of 7 or 8 paints. The first class was pretty much all focused on the color wheel, warm versus cool colors and how to mix our paints down to get the neutral/diminished shades. When we left class with a homework assignment to make an actual painting, I was worried. What about the basics???

By the third class, I was happy that we’d skipped the basics and dove right in. She’s answered all my questions as the classes have progressed and I’ve already learned so much. Really simple things that I never would have thought of, like keeping a sheet of white paper under my palette so I get a true representation of the colors. Now why didn’t I think of that?!

Homework for the first class was to select one color from our color chart and create a painting that used all of its various shades. Simple geometric shapes were fine, but the point was to create a monochromatic painting using, for example, just the 3 blues from our palette, plus the 3 diminished blues, plus all 6 combined with white.

I cheated a little by Googling “monochromatic paintings” for ideas. I ended up painting an abstract sort of Candyland with lots of long curving lines laddered so I could fill in each space with a different shade. I sketched the whole thing out beforehand, so after I’d mixed my color palette (purples), I filled in a bunch of random blocks with each color until the whole thing was covered. I found out later that this is the wrong way to go about painting, according to my instructor, as it gives too much of a paint by numbers feel. I definitely agreed with her on that one.

For the rest of the class, we’re not allowed to use pencils at all. No sketching! The beauty of acrylics is we can keep building and building. If you make a mistake, paint over it! For planning out shapes, she does allow us to paint in the basic layout, but then she wants us to focus more on building the depth, painting in the lights and the darks, ignoring the details until the very end.

Anyway, after I completed the first homework assignment, I knew I had to buy the correct paints. We’re moving at a pretty quick pace and with my ADD addled brain, throwing it another curve by having to translate all of Lisa’s instructions into my own specialized color palette is not a challenge I feel like tackling. The homework project sealed the deal. I mixed so much paint trying to get the right purples out of the wrong paints that I ended up with TONS left over after my monochromatic creation was done.

I hate wasting paint, so I made use of it by painting about a dozen blank sheets of paper with it – backgrounds for future paintings. There was still a lot left, so I scooped as much as I could off my makeshift paper palette (I was testing the theory that I could just use wax paper instead of buying what looks like wax paper disposable palettes. You can’t. It tears and balls up and then you end up with bits of wax paper in your painting.) and saved the rest in a Tupperware container. OK, technically it was a cleaned out potato salad container, but you know what I mean. A week later? I learned that paint keeps just fine in sealed containers if you spritz it with water, but it also grows mold. Wouldn’t have guessed that paint could get moldy. Weird. This *may* have something to do with my potato salad container washing techniques.

Summary of things learned on Day One:

• keep a spray bottle of water handy to spritz your palette with. Acrylics dry out fast and this will save you a lot of paint.
• specific paint colors are important
• a bunch of stuff about the color wheel
• keep a sheet of white paper under your palette so you get true colors
• buy a dishwasher

Thanks for stopping by!  I suppose a little introduction is in order; I’m Kris, your host, resident artist, crafter and now…blogger!  ACageyBee.com (a play on my initials, KGB) was born out of my desire to document and share my growth as an artist, hopefully inspiring others to get past the fear of starting and just DO IT.  Make something!  Draw something!  Have fun!!!

I’ve been working online for several years now doing freelance marketing and design.  While there is a degree of creative freedom in that work, it just can’t compare (for me) to the organic feeling of making something with my own hands.  Feeling a paint brush between my fingers as I swirl different colors together, stitching the details on a softie – that’s when I feel most alive.

Over the last year or so, I’ve put living joyfully as a higher priority.  It’s so easy to get caught up in work stuff, running errands, my somehow always messy house.  By keeping a blog, I’m looking forward to sharing the creative work I do and connecting with other artists who inspire me while hopefully inspiring my readers to explore their own passions.  By putting my goals out there in this wonderful community, I get the added bonus of being held accountable.  So if you don’t see a post from me for a while or just see me writing about being too busy, too stressed, too *too*, feel free to give me a nudge to get me back on path.

Happy crafting!

Kris