Andrew McManus

Technique and Theory

Here I'll reveal all my mysterious secrets about how I make a painting. Hopefully Someone can learn something from this, it's the kind of step by step what-and-how kind of description I wish I had access to when I was first slapping paint around. I'll keep adding on to this section as I learn new things.

Table of Contents

Materials

Paints

I use Winsor & Newton paints, with Michael Harding whites. My palette consists of a split primary arrangement with a few earth colors plus white. Very rarely will I need all of the high intensity colors, and usually only two or three will be needed for a painting.

Michael Harding

Winsor "&" Newton Artist Oils

The other colors that I may need every once in a while are:

Mediums

I've always liked to mix medium into my paint before I start, to unify the working characteristics of the paint and to save time during painting. I use a few different mediums but I am phasing out the use of a few in favor of a walnut oil / lead naphtanate mix. I mix this up in very small batches of 1.5 oz. oil to 15 drops lead nap. The walnut oil is more slippery than linseed and allows for the type of handling and effects that I like and the lead nap dries the painting either overnight or in two days.

I had been using a tradional mixture of damar varnish, turpentine and stand oil in equal parts but since I mix the medium and paint first I found the turpentine would evaporate out and leave me with stickey paint that was a chore to work with. The same thing happpened when I tried out genuine copal mediums. The copal actually made the resultant mixes brighter but left me with a paint that dragged on the brush. I felt like I had to shovel paint on rather than paint it.

Brushes

I use Trekell red sable brushes in rounds and filberts, Trekell hog bristles in flats and filberts and Raphael Kaerell synthetic sable brushes in all shapes. The Trekell brushes are an incredible value, they will last for as long as you take care of them, they are superbly made and are sold factory direct for far cheaper than you'd be able to find at an art supply store. They ship quickly, too. I use their linseed oil soap to clean all my brushes. The raphael brushes are a great value too, but they don't do anything quite as well as the Trekell sables, and they don't last nearly as long.

Surfaces

I paint on a few different surfaces. My favorite surface for small paintings is smooth linen or cotton mounted on a durable surface like Gator Foam or hardboard. I am currently working my way through a large sampling of panels from various manufacturers, New Traditions Art Panels, Real Gesso Panels and RayMar Art Panels, trying to find the highest quality and best working surface I can. With everything I paint on I first apply a wash of burnt umber/black and white to give me a color closer to a middle value on which to paint. This makes most surfaces perform similarly to each other and it allows for more accurate judging of values while painting.

Hue, Value and Chroma

Hue, value and chroma are the three attributes of color. Any color can be measured by these three things. If your paint mix doesn't look the way you want it to one of these three things is not right. An understanding of hue, value and chroma is a very powerful tool and may be brought to bear while painting in any number of ways.

Picture a color wheel as a clock: the hue can be thought of as the name of the color (blue, blue-green, green, yellow-green) or where the minute hand is pointing. Light from the sun or a lightbulb is made up of every color of light we can see. If you were to shine it through a prism you could split it up and see the familiar rainbow pattern. Hue is a measure of what frequencies of light are most dominant. If something appears yellow it is because that object is reflecting a larger measure of yellow light than the other colors shined on it. If you shine a light on a red ball it will absorb most of the other colors but will reflect red light back to your eye.

Value is the relative lightness or darkness of something. If you were to take a black and white picture of a room you would only see values. The lightest is white, which reflects most of the light shined on it, the darkest is black which absorbs almost all light that hits it. Values are the primary tool for our brain to decode what we are seeing.

Chroma is the measure of how intense a certain hue is. Picture two cubes. One is a dull blue and the other is a very intense blue. They may be the same value (you could take a black and white photo of them and they would be indistinguishable) and they may be the same hue (the both point the same direction of the color wheel) but one looks more intense. If they are the same value roughly the same amount of light is being reflected from each surface. The more intense cube is reflecting proportionately more blue light than the dull cube. The duller blue cube is reflecting more of the rest of the spectrum and just a little more blue than everything else, while the intense cube is reflucting just a little bit of the rest of the light and almost all of the blue light that is shined on it.

Composition

Having decided on my subject I start making small compositional sketches, about twenty of them, to try and construct the best possible picture and show off the most interesting things about the objects. After the composition is determined I set up the lighting and backgrounds and subject to try and match what I've drawn. Someties it doesn't look right and I have to go back to the drawing board. I've found this method very useful.

An important thing for me to consider at this stage is the value structure of the painting. With paint you have a very limited amount of light to work with. The darkest dark will be a glossy black paint and the lightest light will be a thickly applied titanium white (the thicker applications of paint appear brighter because they catch more light than the flat applications). A painting can only modify the light that is hitting it, it cannot make its own. Compare this to a computer monitor, which can be black when it is turned off and actually emit enough light to illuminate a dark room. This is where careful consideration of the available values in paint is very important. I need to decide how much of my available brightness and darkness to devote to what parts of a painting. I need to be able to rationalize why the sky should be brighter than the trees, or how dark the shadow should be in relation to the tomato and its background. Only by doing this is a painter able to create the illusion of a bright sky or a blinding highlight on a car windshield or a setting sun.

Another thing to consider at this stage is chroma. If you are painting a very intense yellow subject you must be careful while fixing your value sructure. The most intense yellows are avalable in only the brightest values, therefore, if you intend your lemon or whatever to be comparatively dark to the rest of your painting you will run out of chroma while trying to paint your intense yellows. The reverse can be said for purple objects, whose highest chromas are only available in darker values.

Simultaneous Contrast

Even with the limitations of value and chroma the painter does have powerful visual tools at his disposal, one of which is simultaneous contrast. Simultaneous contrast occurs when two different colors are placed next to each other. Each color will emphasize whatever about the other is different from itself. This can happen for any one of the measures of color (hue, value and chroma), two of them or even all three attributes at the same time. The most common example is when red is placed next green. Their hues could not be more opposite, and the red will emphasize the green-ness of the green and vice versa, visually increasing the intensity of both colors. With value the contrast is very straightforward. If a low value color is placed next to a high value one (say a black dot on pure white) the darker color will make the lighter one appear even lighter, and the light color will make the darker one appear darker. The same holds true when it comes to chroma - a high chroma blue placed next to a dull blue that is very close to being gray will appear much more chromatic than if it was left by itself.

Simultaneous contrast can be used in small sections of a painting or over the entire painting, to either overcome limitations of value or chroma or to enhance certain effects or to draw attention to certain focal points. Remember the dark lemon? Picture making the rest of the painting a bit darker and less chromatic, and even shifting the hues around the lemon toward purple (yellow's complement). This would result in a far more intense, more yellow looking lemon than if hue, value and chroma were not considered when planning the painting.

The Sketch

I carefully draw the subject paying close attention to its position on the canvas, making sure that I accurately portray the contours and transitions. I sometimes use a proportional divider, which is basically two sticks joined together at a pivot. The ends of the sticks mark out a distance between two points which is then automatically reduced or enlarged at a constant ratio on the other end of the dividers between the two opposite points. You can move the pivot to change the ratio. This tool allows for highly accurate enlargements and reductions of anything in two dimensions or viewed in two dimensions (like looking at a landscape with one eye closed).

Painting

After all this planning I mix the main colors of the painting on my palette (a flat glass cutting board). I try to pre-mix most of what I'll need beforehand so that I don't deviate from my plan and I maintain all the important relationships in the painting. Mixing colors on the fly can be a major pitfall during a painting. Then again, some painters mix on the fly exclusively. I prefer a planned and thought out approach because it gives me the most control throughout the entire process. I can only pay attention to so many things at a time so making decisions beforehand allows me to concentrate and paint better pictures.

Now I can start painting. The first step is matching the colors I've mixed to the drawing on the canvas, applying the paint thinly but enough to cover the surface opaquely. I paint from back to front, dark to light. This means that I'll paint the farthest thing from me first (the sky, or the background) and continue painting things that are closer and closer until the canvas is filled up. I paint the darkest things first, like cast shadows and the shadow area on a subject for a few reasons. I find it is easier to keep them pure and undiluted when painting them first: I tend to keep my darker paint thinner than my light, and it only takes a tiy bit of white paint to destroy a dark color. Additionally the darker paints usually dry faster than light, useful if I am painting something in more than one sitting and would like to have an initial layer dry before a second session. The lights in a painting usually seem to come forward, so it I like to paint them in the same order. The last step here is adding the highlights very carefully.

I try not to blend anything together at this point, as blending this early in a painting usually sacrifices drawing accuracy, and can result in transitional mixes that can be very incorrect. I've found that if I see two colors that should transition into one-another it is better to mix the middle color than to rely on blending. One of the only times something will be blended will be when I am painting a complex surface, like onion skin, and need to use wet-in-wet overpainting techniques to get the surface effect I'm after.

Blending and Finishing

Only after everything is where it should be will I start blending, and this is usually just softening a select few areas where the transitions are too hard. This step is usually very fast. Drawing the subject in paint is accomplished in the previous step. If I find myself trying to push paint around at this step I stop and start that are over again.

After every color is in its correct place and blended when necessary I begin finishing the painting. First I think about focal points, making sure that a viewer's eye will rest where I want it to rest. Then I think about contrast, carefully checking if there are any areas on a painting that should be lighter or darker, and making sure the darkest darks in my painting match those in life. Then I do the same for edges, making sure that important transitions are emphasized and unimportant or potentially distracting ones are toned down. Then I look for the reddest area, the bluest, the greenest, etc, making sure my color relationships are correct and adding any especially interesting color notes to the painting. Lastly I look for any especially chromatic areas, like an especially intense spot of red or orange.

Then I do that whole last step over again to make sure I did it right!

I sign my initials, the year and write the date painted on the back of the surface, then it's into the drying rack. Since I paint rather thinly most of the time the painting dry rapidly (with a lot of help from the lead naphtanate). They receive a protective coat of varnish, which is allowed to dry, then they are back into the rack to wait to be framed.

Cleanup

I keep baby wipes handy during painting, I like the Target brand "sensitive" ones for a few reasons. They don't smell like a nursery, they are strong, and they have a very mild surfactant solution that cleans up oils very easily. They are great for wiping a palette clean, and for getting off the odd spot of paint on your brush handle or your fingers while painting.

I wipe the excess paint off of brushes with a paper towel then rinse them the best I can in a silicoil jar with oderless mineral spirits in it. I blot out the excess solvent and lather and rinse the brushes over and over in the palm of my hand with Trekell's Linseed Oil Soap, taking care not to damage the bristles. After they are clean I blot out the water, reshape the tips and set them horizontally to dry.

Thanks for reading!

If you have any questions about my materials or technique please feel free to contact me.