I Was Interviewed by a Student

Recently I was contacted by a student from Connecticut that needed help for a school project.
Her assignment was to interview an artist (and she picked me, amazingly! I guess having a web presence pays off, lol).

She sent me some questions and I type up the answers and emailed them to her. I love it when I get the opportunity to help young people.

They were good questions. Thinking that many people might be wondering the same things, I decided to post them here on my blog.

A few of the questions are fully covered by articles I've written online, so I included a link to my articles for more info.

Here it goes.

Question: What inspires you to make art?

Answer: There are many different reasons for me to pick up the brushes and start a painting.

I love the challenge of trying something slightly new, in fact I learn something from each painting, and each one starts with the idea that it could potentially be my best one ever.

I get very excited about the beauty and the colors of a scene, and about embracing the challenge of rendering it with paint, can I can pull it off?
I love natural scenes, like landscapes and sunsets, but recently I got very excited about the personal challenge of painting urban scenes, with buildings, people, and cars.
I created a folder of reference photos, and I might do a series of small paintings of urban scenes just for the sake of pushing my limits.

It’s good to learn by painting something that is out of my comfort zone.

Q: How to choose the color palette for acrylic painting?

A: I paint both with acrylics and oils, and I approach the process of choosing the palette the same way. First of all I look at the subject that I have to paint. What color is my focal point? What other colors are there? I’ll make sure that the color of my focal point is in my palette.

I always try to create a harmonious painting, and to do this I choose a color scheme and stick to it. That means that I use a limited palette and mix all the needed colors from the chosen tubes.

The tubes of paint that I squeeze out may change from painting to painting.

I alternate between the “classic” limited palette (see next question) and a tetrad scheme, where I use the color wheel as guidance for which colors work well together. In short, a tetrad is a set of four colors equidistant on the color wheel. Often, they are two sets of complimentary colors. For example: blue, orange, yellow-green, and red-violet.

These hues from the color wheel translate into the following tubes of colors*: cobalt blue, cadmium orange, sap green, and quinacridone magenta. I always add white.

*The tubes of paint that fulfill the mentioned tetrad scheme are not limited to those I mentioned, there are more colors that follow under that specific tetrad.

Q: What are the basic colors used in an acrylic painting?

A: The basic colors to use depend a lot from what you are going to paint.

In landscape painting, I like to use a limited palette and mix all the colors I need from a few.

Have you ever heard that from the three primary colors you can mix any color you need? Well, it’s very true, however, depending on what red, what yellow, and what blue you start from as primary, you get different mixes.

Below are the colors that I get out when I use the “classic” limited palette, also called a double primary palette.

For this palette you are supposed to use white plus a cool and a warm version of each primary color.
For this palette my go-to choices are:

titanium white
cadmium yellow light
cadmium yellow deep
cadmium red light
quinacridone magenta
cerulean blue
ultramarine blue

Often I add burnt umber or burnt sienna that mixed with ultramarine blue makes a nice black.
Note that I don’t necessarily use green from a tube. The two yellows and the two blues intermixed can create an amazing variety of greens. For a duller green, I use cadmium yellow deep (that has some red in it) or add a little of red to the yellow + blue mixture, and that dulls it.

Sometimes I limit my colors even more, and only get out one per type of primaries. It gets tricky to mix a wide variety of colors, but if you succeed, they become all harmonized because they are all somehow related.

One example of tetrad (or tetradic) color scheme

Q: How to make certain color “dark” or “light”?

A: To mix a very light color, like a pastel color, I start from pure white, and then very slowly and carefully I add tiny bits of darker color.

It’s easy to go darker, but it’s hard to make a big blob of paint become lighter.

If I need black, or a very dark color, I mix a brown with dark blue. By brown I mean either burnt umber, burnt sienna, or just a mix of red, yellow, and a little bit of blue (which is the same as saying you get brown by mixing red and green).

To make the light color of an object in sunlight, most people mix the color with white. That makes it lighter but also gives the color a “chalky” look, especially if you use titanium white, which is very opaque. The sunlight is yellow (usually), so the color of objects in the direct sun, has a yellow tint to it. White makes it chalky, a little bit of yellow or orange brings it back to life.

Q: What are some basic brush techniques used in painting? Does it matter whether it’s acrylic, oil, or watercolor painting?

A: I find oils and acrylic very similar as far as application, both are thicker and opaque. Watercolors are different, much thinner and transparent, so they require slightly different techniques.

The answer to this question is in an article that I wrote, please refer to this link to see some of the most common brush techniques.

https://feltmagnet.com/painting/Acrylic-Brush-Stroke-Techniques

Q: What kind of brushes are needed for certain painting? Does it matter if you use random brushes?

A: When it comes to brushes, the rule of thumb is that you should use bigger brushes for bigger shapes, and smaller brushes for smaller shapes.

Also, at the beginning of a painting you should focus on grouping the bigger shapes, without worrying too much about the details, so use bigger brushes, often flats or filberts at the beginning.

Then when you are towards the end of the painting and you work on small shapes and details, you can get the small brushes out, and they may include all kinds of shapes, flat, filbert, round, whatever can help you make the mark that you are aiming for.

My favorites seem to be flat brushes, mainly because of their flexibility: I can use them for large bold marks, or sideways for a thin mark.

Once again, I have an article that might come in handy, this one about choosing brushes…. Here is the link to it.

https://feltmagnet.com/painting/How-to-Choose-and-Use-Paint-Brushes-for-Acrylic-Painting

To see more of my articles, you can visit my profile page on Hubpages at https://hubpages.com/@robiebenve

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