The Top 10 Mistakes that Most Artists Make

          1. Tonal Value

This is easily the most common mistake that I see as an Art Teacher, and it’s often a real shame. Artworks with beautiful colours and strokes and gorgeous details become overall flat and lifeless because they don’t have the right range of dark and light or don’t have them in the correct places. Incorrect tonal value has a bigger impact on realism or believability than any other element of a drawing or painting.

2. Contrast

Contrast – the difference between your lightest lights and darkest darks – would be the second biggest mistakes that artists make. If used well, it can draw attention to certain details or make some or all of your subject matter really pop out of the page or canvas. However, most artists overuse the tones in the middle.

3    3. Direction (‘Form’)

Understanding how a 3-dimensional form moves through space is key to creating a convincing illusion of it. To make an artwork believable, an artist has to think in terms of 3-dimensional space – to think about all parts of the object not just those they can see. This prevents an artwork seeming flat. Don’t worry folks – this can be taught! ;)

      4. Using White and Black to Lighten and Darken

There are so many reasons why you shouldn’t do this which I go into in my courses but the best reason is this – what do you get if you mix black and white? Grey. Say no to grey paintings and start creating beautiful colours.

           5. Mis-Using Warm and Cool Colours

Warm and cool colours are a system that each interacts best with those within the same system. You can mix across, but do it too much or in the wrong way and you risk making your picture really muddy and losing any freshness.

      6. Figure Perspective

It’s interesting how many artist know to apply perspective in their landscapes but don’t on their figures. This is especially the case in portraits or figure studies from a three quarter view, where you often see the furthest eye being drawn too big or too high or low. Portraiture and life drawing are the most challenging subjects in most art courses and it takes a while to understand the fundamentals, including perspective on a figure, which is more complex than the one-dimensional perspective most students are familiar with.

      7. Figure Proportions

Figure proportions are tricky when a figure is just standing there, let alone when they move around! As well, we get used to seeing variations in proportions through video games, comics and animations. This can make it hard to see the real thing correctly when we are creating life drawings and figure studies. Many artists make legs and arms too long or heads too small or large relative to the body.

      8. Textures

Many artists make one of two main mistakes with textures – either they get the detail right at the expense of the bigger picture, or the bigger picture right at the expense of the details. The trick to this is efficiency and technique – planning ahead so that you can create both at the same time. Most people struggle specifically with the texture of eyes and hairs – keep an eye out as I’ll give a tutorial on these soon.

      9. Specific Body Parts

Most artists find that there is one (or more!) body part that particularly confounds them, such as hands, feet, knees, ears or eyes. Or when they get it right, they can’t sit it within the context of the rest of the figure well. For example, you finally get beautiful eyes happening but they don’t work within the rest of the head. Some of this will come down to a knowledge of anatomy – there’s a reason classical artists are trained to learn the skeleton and muscles! The other part can usually be resolved with detailed studies of the problem areas and figure perspective.

      10. Shadows

The problem many artists have with shadows are not just about the relative darkness (a tonal value problem), but also the colour, size, details and edges. All of this requires a good understanding of the properties of light, which many artists haven’t had the chance to learn. Some of these problems also come down to understanding warm and cool colour systems, especially with warm toned subject matter.

Pretty much all of these mistakes or problem areas come back to training, and that is something we can help you with. Our Basic Drawing Course is coming online on June 10, and Intermediate and Advanced courses after that. These will teach you the practical skills and tricks you need to be a great artist and they are completely online!

In addition we have free video lessons on our Blueberry Beetle Youtube channel, which we are adding to all the time: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAcmevI_UToWKv4cymMeG8w

So check us out, subscribe and bookmark our Art School: www.blueberrybeetle.com. We hope to see you soon!

Art School in the Making!

OK, so I have been so busy these few few weeks finalising the content for my online Art School! At last! I have been place holding for a long time but soon we will get the content up so people have somewhere to begin.

There will be lessons, videos and a place to ask questions and troubleshoot. I'm going to have a few streams for courses too so people can learn to draw then move onto painting if they wish and so on.

This blog will be the place for the things that don't fit easily into lessons, jokes, cartoons, advice and that sort of thing. So please keep an eye out! we hope to be running really soon!

A Gentler Solution for Washing Oil Painting Brushes

To reduce the amount of turps you need (or cut it out altogether!), try using liquid woolwash with eucalyptus oil to wash your brushes. This is also a strong, yet gentle alternative for other brushes, though you won't need as much. I find it conditions my brushes, keeping them soft, and I can reshape them easy.

Drawing

Painting vs. Drawing

One question that students often ask me is why they need to learn drawing when they want to paint. The main reason for this is that black-and-white drawing will teach you most of what you need to learn about painting - form and direction, light and shade, perspective, positive and negative space, foreshortening, composition, anatomy, character, texture and detail. It will give you hand control and eye-hand coordination. It will also give you observation practise and critical evaluation skills, which further teaches you how to see and correct your own mistakes.

And it will do all of this without colour (hue). That is an advantage in that colour has its own complex rules, so that is one less thing to worry about. But in the overall scheme of a painting, colour is a small part of believability. When trying to convince your audience that your subject matter is real, getting the form right (through tone, direction, perspective etc) far outweighs the importance of getting the colour right. Colour changes rapidly and often, through movement, light, shadow or the presence of other objects. We recognise the object through all of these changes because the form stays the same. If we convey the form believably, we have our audience.

In fact, colour can distract us away from form. It can dilute the all-important tones and tonal changes that create the illusion of form. We can get so caught up in trying to make a vase a beautiful orange that we forget to make it round, shaded, highlighted, full, heavy and reflective. Learning to convey these subject qualities without colour means that you learn their importance and the skills required to achieve them. Colour can then be added to into a working system, taking its place as one quality within many.

Courage

3 of the Most Common Issues in Student Works

While on a rainy day mission for art supplies today, I walked past a few students’ canvas works on display out the front of the shop. Across more than ten artists, there were three things consistently holding back the works from realism or believability – tone, colour mixing and form (shaping). These are some of the most common issues amongst all art students and can define the difference between a student and a professional.

A lot of the techniques to address these issues aren’t readily available to art students. Many books don’t cover these either because the writers don’t know, can’t explain the issues well or because they’re well guarded secrets in this competitive industry.

In a nutshell, tone means the range of lights and darks. A lot of people’s works don’t reflect the full range of tone, either because they don’t see the full range, or don’t know how to mix their colours well, creating  greys, muddy colours and blanched white colours instead of clean, strong mid and dark tones.

The most common colour mixing mistake is to mix across colour systems before having a good working knowledge of how the colours will blend. Colour mixing is a complex science, and more than I can go into at this point, however, to keep it to one rule – only mix warms with warms and cools with cools, til you have extensive experience mixing across. Make a decision early on which way you want to go and stick to it.

The third issue I saw today was form. Many students find it hard to conceptualise the objects they are painting as three-dimensional, and/or, can’t translate the three dimensions of the objects onto a two dimensional flat space. The result is flat work with a lack of believability.

Think about how our eyes work. Our eyes are set up to measure depth quickly and accurately. Every day we navigate through rooms full of furniture, around shops full of products, through hurried, unpredictable crowds or around moving trains, buses or cars. Our eyes are well trained to search for the cues that tell us where the object is located in space – how far across, how far up and how far back, (X, Y and Z axes), as well as the dimensions of the object itself - its size, depth, texture and even weight. To trick our eyes, we need to have these cues well aligned, particularly when working on a flat, two-dimensional plane.

The easiest way to tell our eyes that an object has depth is to show part of the side of that object. Avoid sharp edges as this makes the objects look flat, like a paper toile. This is particularly the case for rounded objects - rounded edges don’t end quickly in reality so don’t paint them as hard lines. To show the side, it may be necessary to adjust your objects or your point of view slightly, otherwise, smudge your edges just enough to suggest that not all parts of the object end at the front.

While this is a quick overview, most students will find that improving these three areas - tone, colour mixing and form - will have a huge impact on their work.