NEW Online Basic Painting Course- Explore your Creative Potential & Develop your Painting Skills

If you want to paint people, objects and places realistically you’ll need to learn Basic Painting skills first. If you try to skip this foundational step you’ll try to recreate what you’re seeing, and it will be difficult for you to get right and it will take you much longer to create a final Art Portfolio piece.

Admissions Counselors of the top Art Programs value your ability to paint realistically from life. They want to see evidence that you are able to paint what you see, so it’s important to take the time to learn Basic Painting for your Art Portfolio.

That’s why we created a new Online Basic Painting Course where you’ll begin by practicing fundamental painting techniques to describe the nature of light and form in the physical world, and then progress to express individual content.

You’ll get started with the color wheel, beginning with the Primary colors, which are red, yellow, and blue.

Then secondary colors orange, green and violet, and tertiary colors such as red orange, yellow orange, yellow green, blue green, blue violet and red violet.

You’ll learn about Complementary colors which are colors that are opposite of each other on the color wheel, and how to use complementary colors to desaturate other colors.

When these colors are placed next to each other, they create the strongest contrast for those two colors. Complementary colors are used frequently in art, which makes learning about them an important fundamental step in learning how to paint well.

After you complete your color wheel, you’ll cut along the line and cut out the circle diagram. It will fit inside the color wheel, then you can fasten the tac onto the color wheel, now you can spin the diagram!

You’ll use your diagram to understand how to use complementary colors to paint a stack of cubes.

Then you’ll learn about Triadic color schemes, which consist of three colors that are evenly spaced on the color wheel to form a triangle.

The most basic triadic palette are the primary colors, red blue and yellow and the secondary hues, orange violet and green.

In this project, you’ll use a set of triad color schemes to fill in one of the two floral patterns.

One of the colors will be used as a dominant color meaning it will be the color used most often, but also will set the mood. The other two colors will be used as accents.

You can choose to fill in the pattern any way you’d like and as always, make sure to keep within the spaces.

In the next project, you’ll create a grayscale using black and white to change the tones. First, using the three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow.

Then you’ll begin mixing tints and shades. A tint is a mixture of a color with white, which increases lightness, while a shade is a mixture with black, which increases darkness

In the next project, you’ll paint 3 dimensional forms such as the cube, cylinder, and sphere, starting with the cube in red, starting with the underpainting to set the mood.

The goal of an underpainting is to establish and determine where the values will go with a thin layer of paint.

You’ll start layering to create the gradient from dark to light starting with the right plane and its core shadow.

Then you’ll move on to a cylinder, painting the entire cylinder and cast shadow with a blue underpainting, moving onto the low light using a mix of black and blue, then a mix of white and blue for the highlight on the top plane.

Lastly, you can make your highlights even lighter and brighten up the contrast on the left side of the cylinder by mixing more white to your paint mixture.

Then you’ll paint Sphere and just like the cube and cylinder, you’ll divide this sphere into high light, low light, core shadow, cast shadow.

In the following project you’ll be painting your very own Mondrian painting!

Piet Mondrian was one of the pioneers of 20th century abstract art. His artwork was redacted to simple geometric elements and this is reflected in the painting you’ll paint. He used simple combinations of straight lines, primary colors, black white and grays. You’ll use a set of Tetrad colors to paint this!- the 2 complementary color pairs that are evenly spaced on the color wheel.

Then a tetrad still life beginning with the underpainting, setting the overall mood. Then, the underpainting for each object to show volume, then create the lighter areas using white to create a tint, then the midtones.

Your last project for the class will be an Installation Still life painting where you’ll learn more sophisticated color mixing techniques to use the full spectrum of colors.

Using a pencil to draw centerlines on your canvas, to get the basic placement for each object, the underpainting, using a lifting technique to lift the excess underpainting to reveal some highlights on the objects, then add dark values to the underpainting, adding base colors for each object, and create a dark value for the cast shadow of each object, work on the highlights and the detailed pattern using a thin brush, noticing the subtle highlights and shadows. To complete your final painting, you’ll tidy up the background.

With each section of the Basic Painting Course you’ll begin to see everything through the lenses of form, perspective, light, value and composition, and the effect will be that your artwork will significantly improve.

We’ve seen many times that students frustrated with their current skill level develop incredibly quickly by following the basic art exercises outlined in this course, and then move on to making the work they’ve imagined in their mind, work that really impresses admissions counselors at the top art schools.

Our new online Basic Painting course is an engaging, flexible, and accessible art course that will empower you to explore your creative potential and develop your drawing skills at your own pace. And we’ll send you the workbook and ALL the Materials you’ll need