Course
Apelles Palette
For 2000 years Apelles of Cos (c.370-c. 320 BCE) was known as the greatest of painters. Praised for his grace and sensuality – he was not only Alexander the Great’s exclusive portrait painter, but was the single greatest influence on…
Grisaille
A grisaille is a monochrome painting executed entirely in shades of grey or of another neutral colour. It can also be referred to as a dead underpainting layer, as people have the hue or appearance of corpses when painted like…
Figurative Realism
You first must be able to faithfully render what you see in the real world before you can exaggerate or modify. Realism is achieved by: modelling – forms, shapes, proportion, perspective lighting – value control edges – hard, soft, lost…
Colour
The perception of colour is relative as the placement of one colour next to another will affect the quality of the other. When we learn to see past this illusion, we can then directly perceive what is before us rather…
Deliberate Practice
Ubung macht der Meister. Practice makes perfect. Hard work beats talent, when talent doesn’t work. Consistently persistent, 10,000 hour rule, 3 hours a day, every day for 10 years. “10,000 hours” as popularized by Malcom Gladwell in Outliers. Quality over…
How to Use a Brush and Pencil
You might question the necessity of an explanation for something that seems so obvious at first. Having observed students, I can attest that it is one of the first stumbling blocks and sometimes the habits are hard to break. But…