Warm Art Diary

This post points out seven of the most essential painting techniques involving knowledge of tone, color, texture, brushwork and composition that will have you painting like a pro in no time.  1. Underpainting:  Try to avoid working from white, especially while using oils or acrylics, instead create an underpainting in acrylic(and hence quick-drying and permanent) burnt umber or  burnt sienna which help establish shadows and values. Also remember to work with thinner paint initially and gradually move to thicker paints and similarly add your brightest highlights gradually too. 2. Blocking:  Different brushes provide different results on a painting because of their shapes, fibers and medium used. The trick is to try a few different kinds in your painting so as to get familiar with their effect on different papers so that you can get results that align best with your vision. 3. Building up texture: Texture is a very fun way to make your painting interesting. I tend to u...

Often, picking between Oil Paints and Watercolors can be a challenge, whether you are new to the world of paint or simply can't decide which media would be best for the project you have in mind, after all it's not hard being spoilt for choices considering the number of options we have. Here's a breakdown of the most important differences to keep in mind before you commit to one of them for your next artwork. Mistakes are easily reversible with oil paints:  Watercolor mistakes, although solvable, can often be tricky, especially with the added risk of ruining the entire paper. Oil paints are much easier to deal with in this respect; one can simply scrape the paint off with a palette knife or wipe it off with a rag. Moreover, since oil paints are more opaque, it's easier to paint over over your mistakes- even when painting white on a dark color.   Vibrant colors are often more tiresome to achieve with watercolors: Oil paints are inherently much more pigmented and hence vib...

     They say watercolor is the most difficult media to work with, but isn't everything difficult before it becomes easy? You will find that most of these "they" are people who gave up on watercolor before they gave it an honest try! In my own experience with watercolor, the coolest thing is that they are mostly not too difficult to fix, that is, once you figure out what exactly is the problem with your artwork.       Here are some common problems I face in my works and my approach to solve them: The composition or the design isn't exactly right : My favorite way to fix this problem is to re-make the study of the composition and practice that on separate spare pages till I get it right and then try to re-work that improved version into my original work which is basically painting over the problematic areas with a slightly more opaque color. I could have sketched/painted it better:  This issue is fairly common with me and frustrating too. My best a...