Virtual Art Academy® Brushwork Painting Lessons

Exciting brushwork adds interest and vitality to your painting, and is what makes a painting a “painting” and not a photograph. If you look closely at a painting with good brushwork you see a small abstract painting that is nothing like the painting when you look at it from a distance. This is the wonderful thing about good brushwork - one painting becomes dozens or even hundreds, depending on where you look!

The way you apply the paint to your painting is important. For example, paint your darks using thin paint and your lights using thicker paint. By keeping your dark areas thin you prevent light bouncing off the paint surface and drawing attention to itself when you don't want it to. On the other hand, thick paint in the lights helps give the lights more luminosity and enhances the painting.

One of the important things in brushwork is to make each brushstroke meaningful and not just random. If your brushstrokes are random you end up with a hackneyed commercial look. On the other hand if each stroke tells the viewer something about the subject, your painting gains strength since the shapes of color made by your brush are simpler. A second very important advantage is that you can paint more quickly and so can capture fast changing light effects more accurately and true to nature. This is essential for outdoor plein air painters.

When you look at a scene, your eye sees only one part clearly in focus. You see the rest of the scene in a more generalized way using your peripheral vision. A painting should do the same for your viewer. Objects in the focal point or focal area should be in sharper focus compared with objects in other parts of the painting. Learning how to draw attention to specific parts of your painting is something that all good artists do. This course unit describes eight important techniques for drawing attention to your focal areas, as well as how to use secondary focal areas in addition to your main focal area.

Old master artists knew how to suggest a lot of detail without actually rendering it. Look closely at any of John Singer Sargen's paintings and you will notice that an elegant dress is no more than a series of abstract brushstrokes. If you make your viewers exercise their own imagination, you stimulate them to contribute their own thoughts and images to the work and become a participant in the experience. If you depict everything to make it look like a photograph, you leave nothing up to the imagination of the viewer. The other big advantage of the principle of suggestion is that once again you can say more with less, simplifying and strengthening the abstract design of your painting.

The mistake a lot of beginners make is to forget to use a full range of edges from hard to soft. If you use edges well you will improve the atmospheric perspective in your landscapes, as well as in your still life paintings and interior scenes. Good edges create a three-dimensional quality in your objects, by making them “turn”.

One of the most important techniques used by the French and Californian Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet (1840-1926), William Ritschel (1864-1949), and Edgar Payne (1882-1947) was optical color mixing. If you view two adjacent color spots from a distance, the eye mixes them to form a third color. This is the basic technique used in many impressionist paintings. There are two key benefits to this approach. The first is that by letting the eye do the mixing, more light reaches the eye than if you were to fully mix the colors physically on the painting. This gives the painting luminosity and makes the color in the painting carry further into the distance. The second benefit is that the vibration created by this approach adds visual interest to otherwise flat areas of color in the painting. This course unit describes nine different approaches for achieving this effect.