*Are your bold colors enhancing your work - or overpowering it?*

Art Tips

If you read my newsletter (thank you!) I assume you also know what my paintings look like. Which means you know that color tends to play a big role in them. Indeed, the compliment I receive most about my work (thank you again!) is about color use. It might strike you as ironic, then, that I actually start my paintings very gray, and only add saturation significantly later in the process. And even when I do add saturation, I typically only increase it little bits at a time.

This underpins my entire personal theory of how color harmony works … or at least, how we perceive color harmony.

My personal color-rule is that you have to earn saturation - kind of like eating your veggies before earning your dessert.

How do you earn saturation? Through grays. Grays are your veggies. For a color to appear saturated in my painting, it must also appear in a more neutral (or desaturated) state somewhere - and ideally in various degrees of desaturation, in multiple places. This allows the viewer to visually ‘trace’ the colors in your paintings along the path of saturation, which I’ve learned from experience is more pleasing to the eye.

If you only give the viewer saturated colors, it is like eating a bowl of ice cream as your entire meal. It can be done, but it feels yucky, or somehow unsophisticated. So eat your veggies, use your grays!

In the Studio: What I’m Creating

I am gung-ho on that figure drawing class I mentioned last time. It’s funny how it’s taken me this long to do one, given that I’ve been making art videos since about 2009, and that figure drawing is how I learned to draw in the first place. I spent a few years doing it almost exclusively! There are just so many things that figure drawing will help you gain and hone: attitude, character, weight, pose, design … I could go on and on. We’re all so in tune with how humans look and move, that the figure is the ideal choice for improving your drawing skills. So stay tuned, I’m excited about this one!

The Art Industry: Making Your Portfolio Stand Out

Having done a lot of portfolio reviews in recent years, the most common aspect I try to help people with is having their work express personality, rather than simply being a collection of the fundamentals on canvas. I wrestle with explaining that difference, because it’s really something intangible that I’m referring to. But a professional artist’s portfolio will always have it - a quality that shifts the focus away from the fundamentals (even though the fundamentals are all there!) and more toward what the picture is trying to say, or the feeling it is saturated with. Having this quality in your work is truly what will make your work stand out in the industry. I know this little paragraph doesn’t explain how to do it. But you know it when you see it, because you can feel it (some artists to check out, off the top of my head: Peter de Seve, Mark Behm, Jaime Jones, Paul Felix, Walter Everett.) I will perhaps keep this topic in mind for a future lesson!

Worth Checking Out: My Latest Picks

Since we’re in the dead of winter (at least, where I live), it seems fitting to recommend one of my favorite novels: The Terror, by Dan Simmons (2007). It’s a nautical tale that blends meticulously researched historical fiction, and totally invented horror. To me, the book succeeds on so many levels - but one thing that’s always felt special about it is that the book just feels cold. As in, I feel like I’m experiencing the sensation of cold when I read it. But not literally of course, because I’m sitting in a warm room, which somehow only adds to it all. It’s a testament to the craft of a good writer, really. On top of this, the story itself is told really well, with a plot that is constantly unraveling and going in unexpected directions. I will warn you, it’s like 800 pages … but it’s totally worth it! (And yes, this is the same title that was adapted by AMC a few years ago. But that version is far inferior, IMHO, and I stopped watching it around episode 3.)