Honing Your Craft: Brush Accuracy
by Armand Cabrera
“Can anything be more tragic than to feel the infinite beauty of your surroundings,
to read natures innermost secrets and, conscious of your own helplessness,
to be incapable of expressing those powerful emotions?”
Isaac Levitan
I am constantly asked by artists---what creates a successful painter? While I believe there are different paths to success, the one most often overlooked by mediocre painters is craft. “Craft” is almost a dirty word today, with the “anything goes” mentality being taught in many art schools and workshops. Craft is the foundation that good art is built upon. You will not succeed as an artist if you only rely on craft. However, you cannot be great without it. You must never abandon the quest to improve your fundamental skills.
The fundamental skills in outdoor painting are:
Brush Control
Drawing from Life
Seeing
I cannot overstate the importance of being able to make the mark you want with your brush on a canvas. Let’s start with that skill in this article and deal with the other fundamentals in future articles.
PAINTING EXERCISE ONE:
MAKING THE CORRECT SHAPE ON YOUR CANVAS
- Place your canvas 90 degrees away from the object you’re going to paint.
- Pick a starting point on your canvas for the object.
- Look over your shoulder at the object. Only look at the object while you draw---not your canvas.
- Outline the object’s shape on the canvas.
- Look back at your canvas and see how accurately you have judged the relationships of its contours.
- Practice this until you can accurately copy any object you are seeing
PAINTING EXERCISE TWO:
PAINTING THE CORRECT SIZE & PLACEMENT ON YOUR CANVAS
- Using a paint brush, paint 10 dots of different sizes on a piece of tracing paper. Paint them randomly with no apparent order.
- Using another piece of paper, copy the placement and size of the dots---without tracing.
- When the paint is dry, lay one over the other to see how accurately you’ve judged their placement and size. The dots should line up almost perfectly.
- Repeat until you are successful
A shortfall I see with many older adults is they think if they take art classes or practice a technique for a year or two, they feel they’ve succeeded at the technique. They are focused on time spent---not on the results of their efforts. You have learned a technique when you have the facility of your teacher and that ability is recognized by others. Children usually understand this concept and will repeat their training over and over until they learn it to everyone’s satisfaction---no matter how long it takes; few adults have that kind of drive.
If you want to make serious improvement in your painting, you need to work on your artistic weaknesses. Practice, practice, practice!
