Posts Tagged ‘armature’

Advanced Painting Atelier – Week 1 -2

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019

I was so excited for this class to begin, in fact, I think I was jumping up and down in my seat. The whole atelier experience has been a huge roller coaster for me by expanding my abilities and making me confront many of my own limitations. This class hasn’t been just about art for any of us. Whenever you push boundaries you’re bound to come face to face with deeply held negative beliefs about yourself and your abilities. This has been no less true for us, and it is a painful journey. As soon as you think you’re past whatever it was, something else looms up to take its place and you begin the process all over again. Painting as a metaphor for life. How interesting. No wonder I’m so passionate about it!

Much of the discussion was about the importance of having a narrative or a story intrinsic to what you’re painting; to think about why and how you are painting what you are. In addition, Rose talked to us about the fact that we will be working on a keystone painting for a series of paintings. We also talked about armatures and did a complementary cast painting.

Someday, I will do a blog post on armatures. Armatures can show you where the most harmonious places are for you to place your focus in a painting that you are constructing. In the painting above, you can see how many of the lines superimposed on the painting correspond with the lines of the painting itself. I love the lines of this painting all on its own in one color. When you look at it in full color, you can see what a masterful artist de Blaas truly was.

Suffice it to say that much of the great art that has ever been created was designed along the lines of an armature, and many books have been written on the subject. Until then, please check out this article: https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-mediums/oil-painting/pech-harmonic-armature/

Complementary paintings occur when you use two colors across from each other on the color wheel such as red and green or violet and yellow. In this case, I ended up with a yellow-green and a violet. We were using gels in front of our spotlights to create different effects on the statues (or casts) that we were to paint. (Once I varnish the painting it will look much better!)