Well, this will be my second official post for The Painting Project blog. We’re wrapping up the winter part of our courses and moving into the spring section. Although you couldn’t tell from all the snow that just got dumped on the ground. In any case, we’ll be starting up some new art classes and continuing some other art classes!
The Foundations course will be opening up a new section in the daytime for all of you folks that have been asking and wondering if that was ever going to happen. It is! We’ll be starting out on March 11. This course gives you the fundamentals of how to create a solid and convincing image of form, space and light on a flat surface. These are the fundamentals of Western Art images. In addition, the course helps hone and strengthen your whole system – the eye, hand, brain, and materials – into an organic whole, which ultimately will allow you the freedom to make and explore what you would like to. So even if your penchant isn’t realist still life painting this course will serve and give you the tools to follow your intuition and inner direction.
Also, the Composition 102 course will be starting up. For those of you who haven’t taken the course, we’ll be covering some important material on how to structure a strong image, whether as a painting or a drawing. The first way we’ll be doing that is by analyzing master paintings – making drawings from reproductions of work and working to figure out how these painters organized a rectangle. Everyone does it differently! We’ll be analyzing both with line – what are the literal shapes that the rectangle is divided into, and also values – how are the lights and darks organized? From there we’ll be experimenting with different kinds of compositions and then starting some drawing and painting exercises to bring these master painting compositions into our own work. It’s truly an invaluable and necessary aspect of image making.
Another course that will be starting up the second week of March will be the Abstraction as Discovery: Works on Paper course. Here is where we get to really let our hair down! For those of you that want to get back to playing – with the freedom we all knew as kids – here it is! We’ll be working in basically black and white palette but with LOTS of different kinds of materials – charcoal, ink, ink wash, graphite, graphite powder, gouache, casein, acrylics, conte sticks, list goes on! And we’ll be mixing and matching, trying out different ways of combining the materials and discovering new and intuitive imagery. It’s a blast! Great music too!
Okeedokee. That’s it for now. See you all soon!