So today I want to talk about one of my first loves: PAINTING. I got started young; apparently before I could hold a pen, I would tell my mom what to draw. I did my first painting of a hydrangea bush in my Grandmom's garden before I even started school. I still have that painting; it's actually matted and framed and at the top of my stairs. It was a watercolor and I remember painting it: we used fan brushes, a brush I eventually learned is rarely used outside watercolor. I remember I put brown paint down in the pink flowers on the ground because I wanted there to be dirt so it was "realistic". I now see the "shameful" brown among the "prostitute" pink flowers as a reflection of my obsession with the human trafficking victims in my later life.
Let's talk for a moment about the symbolism of painting itself. It's basically sexual (as it all is!). You're taking a phallic brush with many phallic bristles and painting seamen-like paint onto a canvas, which receives it (an essentially feminine, aka vaginal, gesture). So... when you paint, you're basically making love to the canvas, yourself, and your subject. It's GREAT.
Ok, a bit of the history of painting. The first evidence we have of it is basically cave art, mostly in France, namely the cave paintings of Lascaux. They're a big deal. It is mostly just bison and deer running around, and people think the idea was to summon these beasts to be hunted by portraying them in art. It's basic "primitive" manifestation technique. From there we get into fragments of papyrus from Egypt and painted pottery in Greece and Macedonia. Pretty soon it's off to the races with the Renaissance Masters and then Pollack and Warhol and Banksy. That's pretty much it. OK!
So, to begin YOUR painting, there are a few preliminaries. Like:
WHO: Who is making the art? Who is it for? If it is of a person, who is that? Who else is going to see it? Is someone going to buy it? Who will they show it to?
WHAT: If it's not a person, what else is the subject? Fruit, a duck, the sun? These all have symbolic meaning and historic context in the field of art. For instance: people used to paint fruit because it was so rare in ancient days; it only came around once a season and was considered an ephemeral treat with great value... so they painted it! In addition to the subject-what, there is the material-what: what materials will you use? There are many types of paint: oil, acrylic, watercolor, enamel (made mostly for painting on metals), and tempra (originally an egg-based paint). What medium, or substance used to cut (thin out) the paint, will you use (like water in watercolor)? In oil painting this could be paint thinner (turpentine or synthetic? Turpentine evaporates really quickly, so if you're working with drips, this has to be taken into account), an expedient Alkyd like Liquin that makes the paint dry faster as well as thinning it out, or another oil like Linseed Oil, that does not.
Each of these has a different "finish" they give the final surface. If you use any type of paint thinner to "water down" your oil paint, your final piece's surface will appear matte (or non-glossy, like paper); if you use another oil, it will be glossier; if you cover it all in Damar Varnish at the end, your painting will be the glossiest it can get without pouring straight up liquid plastic or resin all over it; and if you use Liquin, it will be somewhere between matte and glossy and dry much faster. I use Liquin, mostly.
If you're using acrylic, you can use water to cut your paint, but Matte Medium is better because it doesn't make the paint itself thinner: it maintains the "body" of the paint. Matte Medium also has no effect on acrylic paint's dry time, which is pretty quick, like 30 min or less. I have no idea what you cut enamel with and I don't know that you'd want to, as its main purpose is to be opaque and cover the metal surface. I guess if you're using true tempra paint, you could use egg?? I'm sure water would work, too... If you're using synthetic tempra paint, water is fine as a medium.
HOW: How will you paint your painting? There are as many styles as there are artists, but there are a few "categories" you can generally choose from. These typically fall into the Realism vs. Expressionism categories. Realism just means you want your painting to look as "real" as possible, aka as much like a copy of "reality" as you can make. This means that the paint isn't the "thing", the painting is; the paint is only a vehicle for representation and just sort of fades from the viewer's consciousness. The other camp is Expressionism. This is where you're not going for realism, you want to lean harder into using the paint to express something inside you: how you feel, how you feel about how you feel, what you think about all that, whatever. You're using your art to convey an inner sense of something. You don't care if it looks like an apple, you want to express how the apple feels to YOU, or how you feel about the apple. Now, this can use paint as if it were the "thing", like Van Gogh did with all his work, or you can also not pay much attention to the body and "presence" of the paint itself, like Kandinsky. Both were pretty expressive, but used and probably thought about paint differently. PS- painting "with the paint" (as if it were more of a considered "object" [like Van Gogh]) is called being "painterly". There are other styles within both of these such as being "graphic" or using "Trompe-l'œil" but this main distinction will help you out in the beginning.
WHERE: Where ya gonna paint? Inside, like in a studio or your living room? Or outside, en plein air as we call it, when you actually stand outside and paint? Are you going to paint on a flat surface (this is better for small pieces, as large pieces, laid flat, tend to give a proportionally distorted image in the end) or upright, like on an easel?
WHEN: When will you paint? In the morning, afternoon, evening? Some say the best lighting is around 5 o'clock, aka Golden Hour. If you're painting "from life", you'll need to be consistent with this, because the real question here is lighting. Not only for your subject, if there is one and you're painting "from life", but for the light falling on your canvas/paper/surface. Basically, you need "good light" in order to paint. It's best to do it during the day, as artificial light can do weird things to your colors...
WHY: Why are you making art? Why are you choosing to make that art in painting form? What are you trying to DO here? What are you trying to say/convey? Do you want to change the world somehow, or just paint to relax? Do you want your art to be "beautiful" or to turn from beauty and call out the ugly desperation of this fallen world? What, exactly, do you mean by your art? Now, you don't have to start with a concept when you set out to make a piece of art, and many people don't. Sometimes one arises as you go and sometimes you're just painting your grandma because you love her and want to memorialize all those lovely wrinkles for posterity. Both are fine. Just consider what you're doing, exactly, and why you're doing it.
Ok, so you've thought a bit about it and you're ready to make a painting. Here's some MORE stuff you gotta know about that:
What makes art interesting is CONTRAST. The juxtaposition of opposing forces. The push and pull between different genres, ideas, or aesthetics. There are many forms of this, beginning with aesthetic contrasts like: light and dark, hard and soft, cool and warm, saturated and unsaturated colors. Then there are more conceptual contrasts like dynamic and static, complex and simple, prim and licentious. Then there are super conceptual, more meta juxtapositions like a more male-energy oriented work or a more feminine piece, or a super "sacred" piece that references all religious work and works within that framework, or "heretical" work that calls all that into question, throws all the assumptions out the window, and challenges what art/reality/dogma even is. Putting these concepts next to one another, in the same painting, and/or mixing ALL the ideas, is what makes superior art.
This super includes the corners and center, because of the principals of the Cartesian Coordinate Plane, or xy axis. It goes something like this: in art and in life, the LEFT side of something is feminine, the RIGHT side is masculine, the UPPER part "is" the intellect, and the LOWER part "is" the sexuality of anything representational. So basically, the upper left of the painting is the feminine intellect corner, the lower left is the feminine sexuality corner, the upper right is the masculine mind corner, and the lower right is the masculine sex corner. The center of the piece is the combination of all of these and needs to be considered thusly. The way everything in a piece falls together is considered the GESTALT of the work. This just means the overall feeling of the aesthetic-side of the piece.
PERSPECTIVE is also important. Not only do you have to get it technically right, as if the piece's "viewpoint" were actually feasible and correct, but you have to consider more meta-stuff, as well, like: HOW are you viewing your subject? From the front, side, bird's-eye-view? Are they/is it facing away from you, receding, coming right at you? This gets into a bit of the conceptual side of art, too, because, technically, the canvas is like a little window: it's a literal "(point of) view". So, in what way, and how, and why you are "viewing" your subject is part of your piece's "narrative" and calls into question things like voyeurism, and whether or not your subject "knows" he/she/it's being viewed or painted, and whether or not the person (if you're painting one) is "looking" at you, too. Because it all means stuff and has historical significance. There was a time when, if a woman was looking at the artist/viewer, it was considered super scandalous (Madame X, Girl with a Pearl Earring). Perspective also gets into the idea of obstruction and obfuscation: is there something in the way of our view? What have you chosen, as the master manipulator of this "situation", to put between "us" (the viewers) and your subject? and why? What does that mean: for you, for the subject, for the audience at large? What do all these decisions say about how you/your subject/people do/should/could feel about the act of looking, viewing, or being seen at all?
SCALE is important. Do you want to paint a refrigerator magnet or a wall? Do you want the art to make your viewers cower, feel intimidated and small and be reminded of their insignificance in the face of tyranny/art/YOU, or do you want it to be human-scale, "safe", and familiar? OR do you want it to be crazy tiny and hung way low, so that your audience has to get down on their hands and knees and look, or just get really close to see your work at all, or just have to be curious af to even notice it? What are you saying by making your art the size it is? What is the effect? And why do you want it so? In addition, proportions within your art should be considered: do you want things to be "to scale" aka exactly naturally sized, or crazy, insane, and surreal with a giant, black dog looming over a landscape? Because you can do either. It's up to you.
MATERIAL is probably one of the most important choices you'll ever make in artistic pursuits, for many reasons. First of all, painting is messy and can be toxic. Do you want to have to use chemicals and know their properties and be serious about clean up, or do you want to just use water and tissues? Do you want to paint on canvas? Do you want it to be square, rectangle, oval, an octagon? Would you like to use paper (this absorbs paint more than canvas does)? Would you like to experiment with painting on different types of wood? Glass or a mirror (these get heavy)? My friend once painted the Virgin Mary on Taco Bell wrappers. I knew a lady that painted on seashells. I, myself, once painted on dry erase board and very much enjoyed that slick, glossy, clean af surface. Back in the day, people used to paint on wet lime plaster, that super absorbed the paint, for a very permanent piece, often in a building (I think Da Vinci's The Last Supper is a fresco, aka one of these plaster-painted pieces).
In addition to the paint, you can use whatever else will stick to your surface. I once used Cheez-it crumbs mixed with gold paint to give a piece a "celestial" feel. I'm a pretty big fan of glitter, and rhinestones, and if you can figure out how to build and stretch your own canvas, the options are unlimited in terms of what fabric you can paint on and nearly unlimited as to the shape and size of your frame. I once made a painting on coin-printed fabric I stretched over a frame I made. It was this super conceptual "conspiracy family tree" for a made-up family, the Rockchilds (Rothschild and Rockafeller) with a crest that was a composite of the Trilateral Commission logo and the Council on Foreign Relations icon. It included family members like Fear, Power, and Entertainment with fun fonts that splattered Fear all over the place and put Entertainment in the Disney font.
Let's talk for a moment about your TOOLS. If you want to mix paint, you may want a palette knife, especially if you're mixing quite a bit of a color. (Always make more of a color than you'll need, because it's hard to mix the exact same color again.) When mixing paint, be sure to use the "folding" method, as in, don't just stir that shit: pick some up with the paint knife and turn the knife over and press and drag it into the remaining paint, over and over, by folding it Also, you'll need some sort of palette: I like to use Paper Palette so I can just throw it away and start fresh next time, but wax paper, a piece of wood, or anything really can serve as a palette. "Real" artists often use glass with one side painted white and beveled edges (to better view each color and to avoid cutting themselves) and then wipe it off after every use, often leaving splats of their pure, out-the-tube colors around the edge.
Ok, let's talk brushes. If you're doing watercolor, you want sable brushes, that's a type of hair, idk where it comes from, but it's called sable. If you're doing acrylic and oil, you want a combination of "work horse" brushes to just lay it all out (like hog hair brushes that are stiff and not for detail work), and then you want your finer brushes, for the details and the blending and the layers. These can also be sable, but you better clean the f outta them cuz that sable shit's expensive and oil is not gentle on it: it's a very soft, fine bristle. You can also use synthetic brushes for these detail-oriented times. They're fine, and honestly, a true painter can use anything to paint with, including fingers, little kid brushes, and even dumb shit like leaves if you have to. You'll also need an assortment of different size brushes and, typically, differently shaped brush-bristle heads for making differently types of "marks" or (paint) strokes.
Ok, let's talk PAINT. There are so many different colors with different "coverage", "temperature", and "viscosity"; there are different levels of value of paint (some are like $200 a tube, other are like $12) and so very many fluctuations within these. I'm going to focus on oil paint because that's what I use most, it's the most given to variation, and it's more "alive" than the other types of paint, as it's literally made from earth materials. So oil paint: what is it? It's basically some pigment, which is just colored dirt/powder, and oil, like Safflower Oil or most commonly, Linseed Oil. You can see where the variation comes from: so many different types of oil and pigment combos. The great thing about oil paint is its sheen? flavor? luminescence? IDK but it's just a much richer look than acrylic paint, which is like, plastic based. Something happens when light hits the oil in the paint, especially when there are many layers in a piece: supposedly it reflects differently than any other kind of paint and just looks much more "real"/complex/alive? IDK, I can't say, it's just more MORE than acrylic. Back in my day, Old Holland oils were the best, but Gamblin and Willamsburg are fine too. For beginners, Winsor & Newton is good and at the end of the day, paint is just paint: some colored powder mixed with oils. There may be a certain amount of fading or even color-change with cheaper paints though, especially when mixed with certain surfaces... so watch out for that. This is really just a matter of your surface's toxicity and "conservation quality", trial and error, watching what happens to your work over time...
Paint itself is crazy varied, though. You can have a very opaque paint, or a very transparent one; you can have a very "strong" pigment like all the phthalo's or a "weaker" one like Payne's Gray. Paints really have personalities, and they combine like people do. Your expensive-ass orange may be super strong and opaque and overpower your cheap little lemon yellow when you mix them. Or your rose may mix perfectly with your quinacridone magenta to make just that version of cool pink you like. There are even these crazy newish paints that are water-based oils that can come in like, neon's and super-bright shades that you just couldn't find outside of acrylics, until these came on the market. Plus it's oil paint you can cut with water! Wild stuff! It's crazy and fun and very personal to "get acquainted" with your paints. Same goes for brushes: you "get to know them" and end up liking or disliking them, having favorites, and having shit ones you use and abuse. You may want one for one thing and another for another thing and another for something else entirely. They have different shapes, like square-shaped bristle clusters, "filbert" shaped brushes, and round brushes. These can have long, long bristles (filaments) and short, short ones. Brushes also change over time: they lose bristles, get stiffer from paint hardened deep at the base of their bristles, or you can even cut some brushes' bristles to "shape" your strokes further. Nothing is off limits when it comes to you and your tools. If you want, you can shape a brush down to just a few, or even just one single, bristle for fine, fine detail work...
A word about COLOR: it's nuts. There SO much to know. Yes, there are six basic colors, but then there are other ones like black and white and the different types of these. There are all the different temperatures and shades of the greys; there are browns, topes, and all the other neutrals; silver and gold and copper (as well as just the idea of "metallic" as in metallic blue, or grey, or yellow [which really just means a paint with flecks of mica, or glittery stuff, in it]); and then "tints" like pink, baby blue, and lavender.
A "tint" is when you combine a color with white. A "shade" is when you combine it with black. And both of these refer to a color's relative "value". Now, in the art world, no one really uses these words, but we sure as shit know them and can whip them out if we want to. But what really interests me about color, though, is saturation. This refers to the relative brightness of a color, or how much grey is in it. If a color is super "saturated", it's bright af with like, no grey in it. If it's unsaturated, or desaturated, it has quite a bit of grey. One of my favorite colors is unsaturated purple, or a sort of grey-lavender. It's sort of melancholy and elegant and understated. This brings up another thing about color: it can evoke so, so much and can be so, so personal. So, yes, colors like yellow everyone will agree are "happy" and "bright", but the specific shade of yellow from your grandmother's kitchen will make you feel differently than, say, the regular-ass Crayola yellow. In the same vein, there is a super-creepy short story about this yellow wallpaper infested with some old lady ghost or something; I imagine that yellow is not super bright and happy. Color can work magic miracles on your mood, making you literally feel high, or it can draw you down to the depths of depression, depending on how much white, black, or grey is in it; and you better believe corporations know about the effects color has on you/us and do extensive study and focus groups about all that...
I love super bright, crazy-saturated, child-like intensity to my color palettes. Think Lisa Frank. Das mah bitch. But not, like, all over. I like to pop this insane color with, say, a black background, or if it's interior design-oriented work, a neutral gray. I say neutral because, in addition to tints and shades and saturation, a color also has a temperature. It has a relative warmth or coolness to it. A neutral grey is neither warm nor cool in temperature. This idea is very fun for me: I like to play with warm blues and cool yellows and just fuck around with perception and juxtaposition and expectation with regards to "typical" colors and their combinations. Colors also have "opposites" or "compliments". Like red and green (Christmas, duh), purple and yellow, and orange and blue. These colors "look good" next to one another, setting each other off, and if you combine them in pigment form, it's any easy way to make that color paint less saturated. Play with all of this and learn what happens when you do what with/to what.
In addition, there is sort of the spiritual resonance of every color: because technically, color is a wavelength, a vibration unto itself. I have worked out what all the colors mean to me and I will share them with you now, but, you know, if you disagree, it's likely the Universe will use your ideas about a color in your own life, and that color will appear to you as you understand it. So it's whatever. Here's what I think of color:
RED> This is a "primary (original) color" and is the preeminently MALE color. Jesus wears it. It's basically the "strongest" color: it stands out the most, grabs your attention the most, and has the greatest impact. It "vibrates" the fastest of all the colors (has the shortest wavelength), as well. It's sexual, high-impact, and aggressive af. You want to make a statement, get noticed, go wild? GO RED. (Upon learning more about spirit stuff, I now know that red is actually feminine, and Mary wears it lol. But at the cristic end of the human-experience spectrum, Mary and Jesus are basically one and the same and this blue-red dynamic is essentially meaningless...)
ORANGE> This is a combination of red and yellow (the true path color), so it has more to do with spirituality: Buddhist monks wear orange. It's a "secondary color", meaning it takes two primary colors to make it. Orange is a mellower version of red: still high impact, still vibrating pretty high, just not so in-your-face. It will definitely get you noticed, though, because it's so underutilized. It's kind of an underdog/rebel/independent-thinker color, despite being so bright.
YELLOW> To me, yellow is the color of the "true path", i.e. the Yellow Brick Road (which is actually a bastardization of yellow, because the Wizard of Oz is whack af). It's a pure, "primary" color and is generally pretty chipper. Not too many shades of yellow that aren't fun. Except like, unsaturated yellow, which gets sort of scary, as it's literally yellow and grey. But yeah, yellow is a good, bright color that often denotes the "right way" to go (for me). However, it CAN be co-opted, much like the idea of the "true path" can be perverted and misappropriated, as in the case of the aforementioned Wizard of Oz or even in Rosemary's Baby where all dat shiz is yellow...
GREEN> Ah, green. So complicated. Yes, it's the color of nearly all the earth, and as such, I believe it has been "compromised", "co-opted", and "appropriated" for use by the dark side. When I see green, I turn away or avoid that thing; this is complicated, because my eyes are green, as is like, every plant ever??? IDK, I've gone over this many times in my blog, but another time just for fun! Green is a "bad guy color" because it's the opposite of red, and red and black are satan's colors. This is a thing because one of the principals the bad guys live by is that of "hiding in opposites". As in, if you "want children to molest", you "start a non-profit to benefit children", not only providing you with an endless supply of victims but also providing the "perfect" cover for your "operation"... that kind of sick shit. So, when I see green (and white) I immediately think of satan-in-disguise and run like hell... or at least take note and watch for perfidy. But, you know, that's me, that's how I feel about green. It shows up in my life that way and while I do honestly see it used in media and out in the world in that way as well, it technically doesn't have to be that way at all. It's not like satan made the trees and bushes and grass. IDK. Told ya: green's complicated.
BLUE> Blue is the quintessential FEMININE color. Mary wears it. It, too, is a "primary color". It's the color of the sky and water and all the things that are passive, calm, and chill. It's a very beautiful, tranquil color of equanimity. You're welcome. (Again, upon further "inspection", I now believe blue is actually Christ's color, as he is actually the chiller of the two cristic personalities... Ms. Magdalene is typically more fired up and therefore wears RED more.)
PURPLE> Ok, so purple is a secondary color, the combination of red and blue, or masculinity and femininity. That's why it was considered "royal" back in the day; it was kinda the purview of royalty not only to be sexy and sexual in olden times, but to be sort of the preeminent sexuality in all the realm. Purple, being the inherent combo of male and female colors, is super, crazy "sexy" and therefore "prosperous" and just psychically strong: it's the color of the Crown Chakra. Purple is fantastically rich and has many variations; it's just a wonderful, wonderful color I whip out on special occasions... or just to prove a POINT, bro. (;) <=8
BLACK> Black is the "shadow", or that which is unacknowledged, repressed, or avoided. It is the "darkness" and often represents lack or negativity. However, in Shadow Work, the "gold" too bright to behold hides there, as well.
WHITE> White is the "light", or that which is acknowledge, seen, and sought out. It just represents what is commonly known, agreed upon, and revealed. Also purity and new beginnings and blank(ness) shit...
GREY> Grey is a combo of black and white, light and dark, and is therefore kinda special: it can represent the holy combination of these opposites, as in the "mandorla" idea in Shadow Work; or it can represent the sort of banal, insipid, malaise of modern life.
BROWN> Brown, to me, is the color of poop and therefore reads as "shame". Sorry.
PINK> Pink is special because it's a combo of red and white (which are technically The Magician [Jesus] colors). This is kinda weird, because pink is really the color of the Prostitute. (You see where my new idea about red being the Magdalene's color makes more sense here...) I've talked a lot about this very essential archetype in my blog, but once more! The Prostitute energy is just based on the way a prostitute interacts with society at large: alone. The idea is that a prostitute solicits the world as a lone individual; they go out into society and act as a lone agent. This can best be seen in the Prostitutes' number: 13. One, being the individual, and three being the community. So the color pink, the number 13, and the Prostitute archetype all really denote a way of interacting with the world. We all engage in our prostitute selves when we go to work, for example, or when we go to the mall alone, or an art gallery opening solo, or just take a walk outside without a partner. It doesn't have much to do with sex, or sex for money, it's more about how we operate as individuals with society at large. So, yeah, Jesus could therefore be seen as activating his "prostitute self" when he's, say, preaching or proselytizing or riding about Jerusalem on a donkey; and the color pink would cover all that.
SILVER> Silver is a feminine color, like the moon. The metal silver is actually made of molecules in crescent moon shapes. It's implied that silver is the prosperous side of femininity.
GOLD> Gold is masculine, like the sun. The metal gold is actually made of little starburst-like molecules that mimic the shape of the sun. It's also crazy pure: one of the reasons it's so highly valued. When you find gold in nature, it's never mixed with another alloy or anything. It, too, represents the prosperous side of masculinity.
COPPER> This is a reddish metal, so it's technically a masculine hue (another name for color). (However, we now know red is feminine, which makes sense when one considers that the metal copper belongs to the planet Venus...)
Alright! Let's talk TECHNIQUE. So, depending on what you want to do, there are many ways to approach the actual job of painting. If you want that old-school, representational, photo-realism look, you may want to start with an underpainting. Traditionally, this is done in some basic, but dark, neutral color, like burnt umber (brown). The idea is you paint this monochromatic painting of the relative "values" of the work first. For reference, value is referring to the relative lightness or darkness of parts of your art. So, basically, you're painting a black-and-white photo, with special attention paid to how dark the darks are in relation to one another and how light the lights are in same. Then you're supposed to "glaze" over the value you've established with color, sort of laying color over the lights and darks. A glaze is just a diluted layer of paint, aka oil/Liquin/paint thinner mixed with paint, so that you're not just laying opaque layers over already-established value and essentially covering up all the work you just did to lay down the light and shadow. This underpainting technique can work out fine, but it's a bit old-school and kinda tiresome/boring. You have to wait for each layer to dry and you use a lot of techniques like scumbling and dry brushing, where you just smudge and smear thin layers of paint without medium. It's tedious and very marginal-analysis-y.
A slightly more interesting approach is the wet-on-wet technique, where you just go balls to the walls for like 8 hours and paint that shit all at once. The finished wet-on-wet pieces can look different or the same as a painting painted-on layers with a proper underpainting, but to the trained eye, you can usually tell if someone layered their stuff or just painted it all at once. Neither is "better", they're just different approaches with different technique and kinda "say" different things about how you're "handling" your subject: with passion (wet-on-wet and all at once) or with measured, tempered reason and restraint (underpainting and many layers of considered colors and value).
There are also techniques like pointillism where you literally use dots to build a picture. The above picture is the quintessential pointillism painting. You can go very Monet and use impressionistic techniques that layer all the colors in semi-serious brush strokes that emulate light itself and focus mainly on the "impression" your subject gives you. You can also use impasto, kinda like Van Gogh, where you build a textured surface that references the paint itself, using it and its body to mean/represent things, like a thick stroke of white paint on a wave could be "foam" or the same on a cupcake could be "icing". I much enjoy Wayne Thiebauld's paintings of cakes with the impasto technique. I will say, most pure white details go on last in a painting.
Ok, let's talk actual technique. When you start painting, you may want to sketch out your stuff on the surface first with a pencil; or not, some people sketch with the paint. If you do this, work with very diluted paint, as in "glazes". When you start any painting you want to do this: start very thin and then get thicker, because this is how paint naturally lays. You can't paint a thin layer over a thicker one until it's dry, so if you're going to want to paint consecutive hours or whatever, start thin.
As for how to make an object come to life, you're going to start by painting its SHAPE. The world and art is just shapes (except drawing and some prints, which are line-based). But you're making a painting, so yes, it's shapes for you right now. So, first, "block in" all the pertinent shapes. Cover the whole surface; it's best to work the whole field equally. You *can* focus on certain areas more than others as you get into the process of painting, but you don't want to "fall behind" anywhere on your painting. And you certainly don't want any of your surface to be/look "unconsidered".
Block your first layer in with mid-range colors. If you're painting that apple, paint the first circle with a glaze of basic, medium red: not too light, not too dark, nor too warm or cool; just middle of the road. That way, you can paint the highlight shapes and the shadow shapes from/into/on top of that base color and it'll all make more sense/look more natural. But yes, it's STILL ALL SHAPES. The shadows are just shapes and the light also falls and forms in shapes. When you get more advanced, you'll look for shadows within shadows and highlights within light. But at first, it's just basic-ass shapes. If you feel crazy and can't "see" the shapes, regress a little, and cut them out of paper and train your eye that way.
There's also this business called "edge quality" in art; as in stuff "further away" seems fuzzier at the edges and stuff "closer to you" is clearer and has crisper, more defined edges. Just keep it in mind... I couldn't find a great pic of this actual concept in use, but this'll give you an idea of what I mean... This idea can also be used conceptually, as in stuff that collapses psychologically or emotionally or what have you, can be depicted as "blending" into one another on your art surface...
As far as painting itself goes, there are a few things to be said. You can obviously drag the brush, but you can also pat it. Many fine "representational" painters pat their way through wonderfully real-seeming work. And that's fine, but it's kinda bitch shit. REAL painters get into the mark of the brush and the body of the paint: reveling in their paint strokes' different sizes, directions, and the relative thickness of the paint itself. Blending is also a thing: it's when one color "turns into" another color in a sort of gradient; it involves a lot of back and forth with the brush, mixing and adjusting and just trying to make it look right. It's kinda complicated and intuitive and you can really fuck it up, but with practice, you'll get the feel of it; and there's nothing more satisfying than painting a successfully smooth gradient (the mark of great blending).
When you're painting, you need to develop an awareness of where the paint is distributed on your brush. Did you use the paint just at the tip? You still have some near the base: use it. Is there still some paint on the other side of your brush? Roll it over. Rolling a brush is a big thing, actually: you roll it in the paint on your palette, you roll it in your hand when you're painting, and you roll it when you're cleaning it. Keeping track of the actual paint on your brush (and where its located and how much of it is there) becomes intuitive and second nature after a while, but this is where painting really happens (betwixt the brush and canvas) and you need to be aware of it.
Clean Up: oil paint is serious stuff and you MUST clean up properly, for your health and the "health" of your brushes. The good news is, you ain't gotta do it right away. Oil paint takes forever to dry, so you can let your brushes sit for hours and almost days, sometimes, before you wash them. But YOU MUST WASH THEM. Obviously. Or they die. Obviously. This requires nothing special as most soaps are designed to cut oil. You can literally use hand soap or dish soap. But first, you should wipe your brushes on a rag, and possibly dip them in paint thinner before you soap-and-water wash them. Store your paint thinner in a glass jar with a lid, cuz that shiz evaporates crazy fast if you don't and it WILL fuck up any plastic containers so make sure to use GLASS. You can get fancy brush cleaners that ostensibly help your bristles out somehow, but who cares when regular soap basically does the same thing? Save your money. As for the paint on YOU, you can also wash with soap, but stuff like Vaseline, lotion, and any oil gets the paint on you moving just as well. But remember, oil paint is toxic, so don't eat it, don't let your pets eat it, and DO NOT LET CHILDREN ANYWHERE NEAR IT. If you have children, it's best to use acrylic, actually. Or watercolor. Or tempra. But NOT oil paint or even enamel.
Ok let's talk skin tone. If you're painting skin, you want good skin tone, so you're going to need to use all the colors. There's nothing worse than "flat" skin. If someone just took peach or brown and made the whole arm of someone one color, it wouldn't look "real", right? You need to use many, many colors to make something look real. Actually, this is the key to realism: variety of hue. You want to paint grass that looks real? Just mix up a billion different greens. In addition, to give TRUE depth to your art, you need to pay attention to not only value (or light and dark), but to TEMPERATURE, or the relative warmth or coolness of your paint. And then, you want to layer this: warm next to cool next to warm, or even warm over cool, can give a depth to your work that "flat" painters never dreamed of. This is a straight up art hack here guys, btw, because it applies to all color use, all around.
Ok, before we finish, let us devote time to the conceptual side of art. You can do so much with art besides "representation", or just copying reality. It doesn't have to be super-cerebral, either. Monet was just interested in light and wanted to "capture" it, and, honestly, that was revolutionary for his day. He went out at different times of day and painted banal shit like hay stacks, just to study the way light fell on them (see above). Schiele was kind of a creep and wanted to show young, young girls, sometimes doing lesbian stuff (see below). The idea was just to buck the sexual system, a basic notion, but more "conceptual" than just, you know, painting age-appropriate women. Van Gogh just had the wholly original idea at the time to make the paint part of the painting, instead of "disappearing it" from the viewers' consciousness. So, you ain't gotta think too hard to be "conceptual". But you certainly can.
Artists like Magritte and Dali just wanted to fuck with reality and make us question perception itself, as did the Cubists, like Picasso, but who actually went a little further than that. Picasso could paint like a boss, btw, photo-realism style, but he chose to put noses and lips in weird places to make a point. Cubism wanted to show "things as they are" not as they appear, and tried to break them down into disparate planes and angles and then reassemble them onto a flat surface; Picasso tried to paint objects as if they were in view them from all sides at all times, which was really an effect reminiscent of what was going on in science at the time: Einstein was questioning space and time and saying that they were really collapsed, or at least intrinsically intertwined, and definitely relative.
Pollack, Stella, Rothko, and Mondrian challenged our ideas of what art even IS; as did Basquiat, who really called into question the "formality" of expression as well as the old-guard white-guys in the 80's who "ruled over the art world". You could say that Caravaggio was a realist, but with all that darkness-come-to-life, his work could border on the moody, surreal side of things/the psyche itself. Then there are the women of Gee's Bend, a super isolated isthmus in Alabama, who just blew 2D art theory out of the water with their wild patterns and intuitive placement of scraps of super-personal fabric in their paradigm-shifting quilts. When asked why they put a particular piece of fabric where they did, they just answered, "Because I felt like it" and nearly invented the genre of "outsider art".
Within conceptualism, you can work with aesthetic concepts like positive and negative space; or you can get into National art like tradition Asian, African, Latin American, or Aboriginal art; or you can work with collage-like additions, where you just tac on whatever you want to a piece. A new idea I had recently was to make a collage, or alter some famous photo by drawing on it, and then paint that. A sort of meta-analysis of an already-recognized work, seen through the lens of my own interpretation after I altered it. Then there's spiritually conceptual stuff like all of Feng Shui and Islam's sacred geometry. Then there's the historical context of techniques, colors, and materials (like Chiaroscuro and Sfumato, which were developed during the Renaissance and reflected the polarized and obfuscated mentality of that time/what they were trying as a society to leave behind; or how certain blues, or types of pottery, or Carrera marbles were favored in Ancient Rome).
There's also your current cultural climate to consider: if you paint Palestinian children now, that will mean something different than if you painted Indian children, or a cat, or blocks of colors or what have you. Then there are the movements of the past to play with, like DADA or the Situationist movement. I love both of these, for their elements of surprise, humor, and play; the "divine intervention" involved; and just how the action or the idea is the thing, and what these produce is like, just incidental evidence that the act took place. It's all very res ipsa loquitur (which is another thing in art: TEXT, FONT & LANGUAGE).
An example: early DADA artists would paste little squares of paper to a larger piece of paper by letting them just fall on the glue-covered surface and THAT was the art. In a sense, DADA art is anti-art. It is an anti-aesthetic based on irrationality and bucking mainstream ideas about art and the way it looks/is/is made. But the real art in the dropped-paper-pieces piece was the idea and the action and the hand of God in it all... (Which brings up another important and imminent and pervasive "argument" in art: should art stand alone or is a little backstory ok? Like, those pasted-paper DADA pieces probably didn't look like much, but the concept behind them was pretty ground-breaking; but to FEEL & UNDERSTAND that would require a little bit of story accompaniment, aka a gallery plaque or something...) Also, it's entirely possible the guy lied about the whole thing (since the pieces of paper actually look pretty arranged...), which is also art lol and gets into the nature of art-as-a-lie and what representation and perception even mean...
Duchamp, arguably the father of DADA, when his piece The Large Glass broke en route to a show, claimed it was part of the art of it all. He also did crazy "readymade" pieces where he took urbane stuff and re-contextualized it with minimal alterations to poke fun at it and society, for making it: like when he took a postcard of the Mona Lisa and drew a mustache on her and called it L.H.O.O.Q., which is a gramogram; the letters pronounced in French sound like "Elle a chaud au cul", or "She is hot in the arse", or "She has a hot ass". The Situationists were bent out of shape about consumerism, capitalism, and conformity in general. They would walk around, off the sidewalk or any defined path, just to prove that a) they weren't at work and b) they ain't gotta walk any way that has been pre-defined for them. They also did fun stuff like cut up and draw on and reassemble maps, to prove that nothing has to be any certain way at all. Basically, in terms of concept, you can break all the rules if you want, and that can be the point, provided you know the rules to begin with.
Within the field of conceptualism lies symbolism, as well. A symbol is an object, or a mark, or a character (like a letter or number) that stands for something else, or multiple somethings else. Like the US flag is a symbol for America, American values, the American people, American government, and America the country. Red, white, blue, stars, stripes, and fabric in a rectangle is really not related to any of this at all, but when we agree on it, it becomes a representation of something else entirely. The same goes for something like a rose, or the number 57, or the word "Mary". These all mean things that we have agreed they mean as a society, but deeper than that, they mean things to our souls, our subconscious, and the collective unconscious we all share. If you can "speak this language" of symbols, you can do more than make art, you can change people's minds, hearts, and the world at large (sometimes without them even knowing it [this should ring alarm bells in some of y'all's heads PS]).
Painting, and really all art, is about PATIENCE, TRUTH, and LOVE. You must LOVE it to put up with all the mess, frustration, and pain (yes, it can hurt, and be repetivite af, and just drive you absolutely bat-shit mad). Not to mention the obscene poverty of most of your life, if you choose to do it full-time. You must also be crazy PATIENT, because oil painting and idea-forming and just, making art takes so, so much time. Technically, oil doesn't fully dry for like 50 years, and yeah, art just takes TIME: time to think about, time to do and then fuck up and then fix; time to go crazy and then sane and then crazy and then sane? and then to just develop into its best self. So yea, suuuuuper patient... ALSO, you must also use your art well. God gave you those skills for a reason, and it's not to sell more Cheetos, trust me. You must tell the TRUTH with your ability, or you will never "make it big" AND feel good at the end of the day.
Elvis definitely "made it", but he felt like hell, really, all the time because not only had he been made into a sell-out by his manager and crew of songwriters and movie producers and hangers-on, but he lost touch with his heart/the heart of rock and roll and forgot why he started singing in the first place. Plus, the man never wrote a song in his life: he was literally a tool for the industry that chewed him up and spit him out. That divine, revelatory, redemptive process of destruction/discovery/creation was basically absent from Elvis's career. His manager, the "Colonel", didn't even read his movie scripts before he committed Elvis to them. In essence, it wasn't about his art at the end (and, really, it hardly ever was- Elvis was a consummate performer, fashionisto, and waylayer of propriety who happened to have good taste and [for a while] his finger on the pulse, but he wasn't much of a creator). Elvis was perpetually unhappy because (of all the drugs and because) he always felt like a fraud or imposter and that he'd "missed the mark" because what he really wanted was to be a serious movie actor. Instead, he was Elvis the Pelvis in the music business and something of an onscreen joke in the movie industry. The Lesson: Know what you're doing, who you're doing it for, and why you're doing it AT ALL TIMES in your artistic career. Also, maintain control of your image, aesthetic, process, and credo in art or you'll get lost in the sauce, wish things were otherwise, and die tragically (really or career-wise).
No one goes into art for the money. But if you do "make it", then lose your "truth" or eventually have nothing left to "say", and start making art just for the cash, your art will certainly reflect this death-of-your-soul, and your audience will leave as fast as they came. But if you stay true to yourself, your vision, and what you have to say, you'll find art (one of) the most enjoyable thing(s) you can ever hope to do. An ARTful life can be the most fulfilling, spectacular (as in... THE SPECTACLE), productive, deeply satisfying way to live... but only if you respect all aspects of the process; including the self-promotion at the end and the death and destruction that happens at the beginning to "make way" for the gush of creativity and rebirth and NEW LIFE that art is... And remember:
I LOVE YOU WITH ALL OF MY ART!
:) :) :)
