Learning to suggest the details in your painting is much more powerful than detailed rendering. More sophisticated paintings suggest detail without actually rendering it. This increases the viewer’s involvement and interest in the painting by making viewers exercise their own imagination, which is almost limitless.
See how I just suggest the shape of the figures here.
This is a small painting, only a few inches in size.
Why you should suggest the shapes in your paintings
No longer are you just showing the viewer what you, the artist, is thinking about, but you are stimulating them to contribute their own thoughts and images to the work. In this way, the viewer becomes a participant in the experience.
If you depict everything as does a camera, you leave nothing up to the imagination of the viewer, who becomes just a spectator of the work, rather than a participant in it.
Look at the flowers in the above painting. They aren’t defined in any details, but suggest them by using a few (fairly accurate) dabs of color. I do the same to suggest the leaves in the back of the still life. In this case by painting some color then scraping it off with a palette knife to leave just a trace of green color.
I also like this as an abstract composition:
Here is another painting from my recent plein air painting trip in Morocco showing the same principle where I suggest the scene.
And another painting below (much earlier than the above work), in which you can see where I suggest the detail in the windows of the old buildings in an old village in southern Tuscany in Italy.
To learn more about how you can use brushwork to increase the viewer’s involvement and interest in the painting by making them exercise their own imagination through use of suggestion, see workshop L of the Virtual Art Academy® Apprentice Program.
Thank You
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope you find it useful. If you would like to get free painting tips by email, please sign up for my free tips newsletter.
If you are interested in a structured approach for learning how to paint, take a look at my online painting classes.
Happy painting!
Barry John Raybould
Virtual Art Academy
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Before repurposing my vocation into avocation, I spent 20 years in the corporate world as an instructional designer and performance consultant creating training curricula for diverse clientele from NASA to General Motors. I know curriculum development and how to guide a learner from beginning to certification. VAA is the only online learning program I have… Read more “Only online learning program I have ever discovered using a training industry best practice”
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I have been a student of VAA since 2011. I had been searching for an online art program that could assist in helping me develop as an artist. VAA is a complete program for beginners as well as advanced students of art. The course is well structured and takes you step by step so you… Read more “The improvement in my own work reaffirms that I’ve found the right program to develop as an artist”
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I am extremely impressed with the process that Barry has developed for VAA. Learning to paint can be intimidating, but when broken into many small projects it is very do-able. I just did my first live model painting session- a 5 hour, one day session. Thanks to VAA, I was able to break the painting… Read more “The small steps are easy to do”
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I finished the VAA course a few years ago, but always refer to the notes, rereading the course many times. This is not a course the day you are finished, you are done. No, you keep practising the assignments getting better and better over time. When I look back at my work when I had just… Read more “No need to buy expensive art books…. Just do the VAA 4 year course. I still refer to it”
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The course is working great, the lessons are set out so well that every week I can see growth. In following the program it’s given me direction, and the information in the lesson plans are of a professional level. There is no way I would have tracked down the information by myself, and being in… Read more “The course has a steady learning curve that keeps revealing itself as you advance”
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This is a far more superior school than anything I have seen being taught at colleges across the country and have learned much more from the Virtual Art Academy® than from any art course I have ever taken! I cannot begin to tell how the Virtual Art Academy has improved my observation of potential compositions… Read more “This is a far more superior school than anything I have seen being taught at colleges across the country”