The Complete Painter: Lessons from the Masters

Humans have been painting for more than 40,000 years and creating pigments for more than 300,000 years. You’ll join that great tradition by making your own pigments and paints in this lesson. Learn why the masters began their careers by copying others and why this is the best time in history to learn to paint.

Oil-based paints are considered the most versatile medium for painters today. But with pigments, oils, and solvents comes the potential danger of toxicity and combustion. Learn how to take proper safety precautions—reading the Safety Data Sheet and product label for each item you buy, ventilating the room where you paint, and properly disposing of hazardous waste.

What are the “must-haves” for your workspace? Learn about necessary supplies, including paper, pencils, additives, brushes, and the six specific tubes of paint you’ll need for your first palette. You’ll also learn why so many painters rely on the mahl stick—and how to build your own.

Explore your lighting options for both natural and artificial light and learn how they impact your painting, palette, and subject. You’ll also learn how to set your paints on the palette to allow for greatest efficiency and flexibility, and how to clean everything at the end of your session with brush cleaners you’ll build yourself.

Studying John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, you’ll learn how the placement of the brush in your hand affects the types of strokes you can make. As you test various options with your own brush placement, pressure, speed, and dilutions, you’ll experiment with a variety of lines and marks—and examine those of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and many others.

In this lesson, you’ll experiment with many ways to change value by changing opacity, hatching, stippling, and more. You’ll also learn a variety of ways to create an edge, making it hard or soft. You’ll experiment with many different ways to both apply and remove paint, and learn about the relationships between thick and thin layers—and what will stand the test of time.

As you study line, texture, contour, space, and proportion, you’ll learn how painters can start with a flat shape and create a three-dimensional solid. By examining Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and other paintings, you’ll learn how artists build upon simple geometric figures to create highly organized groupings of interlocking shapes.

With the goal of painting grisailles and brunailles—paintings executed entirely in shades of gray or brown, respectively—you’ll learn a step-by-step method for developing two appropriate value scales. In the process, you’ll explore paint mixing, assessing the value of those mixtures, identifying and correcting mistakes, and understanding the effects of simultaneous contrast.

Before creating a brunaille based on Norman Lundin’s Simple Still Life–Three Cups, you’ll learn how to transfer the cartoon files to your surface, as well as options for using the grid system to scale up or down. You’ll visually take the painting apart to carefully identify the work’s shapes, and then use your value chart to guide you through the painting process.

Learn how value affects the mood of a painting—with a greater range of values bringing higher energy and a smaller range bringing a softer, calmer mood. Explore how value also can create pattern, a focal hierarchy, and the illusion of space and three-dimensional volume. You’ll also examine the way light can be used to give a flat effect or to produce greater drama with a chiaroscuro.

By painting a chiaroscuro block and sphere in grisaille, you’ll apply value mixing skills—with 17 different values in this exercise—and explore the way light affects rectilinear and curvilinear forms. You’ll practice blending edges, experimenting with a variety of brushes and the use of horizontal and vertical strokes.

In this lesson, you’ll experiment with using value intuitively, leaving behind the numerical references you used previously. You’ll learn how the illusion of a complex three-dimensional form is created as you work with value and shadows. And you’ll learn to see the planar structure beneath an object, considering both value and edges as you bring life to the structure.

In this lesson, you’ll explore the full palette of earth tones, black, and white—a palette that has been used for millennia in every geographic area. As you experiment with a color-mixing exercise, methodically developing a chart to reveal the full range of this palette, you’ll observe the way the colors seem to change depending on their context.

Explore the benefits of the gridded velo, calipers, beam compasses, and even tracing paper. These tools have been used from da Vinci to the modern age for developing precise proportions when painting. Specifically, learn how to work with proportional dividers to help the accuracy of your work, whether you’re copying from another painting or painting a still life.

Nothing is more important to the success of a painting than composition—the organization of elements that brings cohesion to the work. Learn how to look deeply at paintings to discover compositional patterns and to improve your own work by examining format, simple and compound aggregate shapes, the box strategy, the crucial role played by “background,” and more.

Learn how to develop and work with an armature, the structure that determines the organization of elements in your painting and guides the viewer’s eyes through your work. Whether it’s the placement of a large figure or the angle of a hairline, generations of artists from diverse cultures have depended on the armature to bring visual power into their works.

Learn how to construct your painting to control the viewer’s path through its visual information. What do you want the observer to attend to first, second, next? You’ll explore the elements of compositional weight and balance, space, hierarchy, focal considerations, color, and more to understand the ways in which each of these factors affects your viewer’s experience.

In this lesson, you’ll practice the elements you’ve learned—from value to composition—with several painting assignments. In addition to a still life, you’ll work with cartoons of paintings by Degas and Hammershøi, and numerous specific suggestions for painting groupings of geometric solids, fabric, and maybe even a room in your own home.

Two tubes of paint with similar names—or even the exact same name—can appear and behave very differently depending on their chemical composition and the processes used in manufacturing. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to glean information from paint labels and how to utilize the Color IndexTM, often abbreviated CIGN, the international classification system for dyes and pigments.

Learn how opacity, tinting strength, permanence, and consistency affect your paint’s performance, and how to identify these characteristics from the paint’s label. You’ll also learn how to make sure your paint is safe, how to proceed if the label does note a health hazard, and how to care for your paints once in your workspace.

Learn the difference between additive and subtractive mixing, how those processes impact the colors you’ll see when you mix your paints, and why formal color theory doesn’t always reflect how paints work in the real world. You’ll begin to create your own color chart in order to experiment with the value, hue, and saturation of your particular paints.

Examine the limited palettes used by some of the great masters throughout history—monochrome, dominant hue, analogous, split complementary, and more—and explore how they strategized color usage to create a particular mood in a painting. You’ll build your own palette as you explore an exercise on color mixing, trying to match your paints to a specific color on a print.

All painters would love to find a medium that would cause the exact result they want with no negative effects. Instead, it’s all about compromise. Learn about the pros and cons of linseed oil, oil of rosemary, odorless mineral spirits, hydrocarbon resins, balsams, yellow beeswax, and more. You’ll experiment with making damar varnish and find recipes for numerous others.

Although almost all artists today paint with brushes, painters have experimented with an enormous variety of tools—from fingers to squeegees. In this lesson, you’ll explore the two main categories of brushes, their variability in price, and how to best care for them. You’ll also learn why hog hair is the best natural bristle and why “sable” brushes are almost never made from sable.