Carol Marine painting demonstration

Daily painter Carol Marine creates a small still life painting, of a bell pepper, in the instruction video Carol Marine Daily Painting Demo. She paints on a canvas with a yellow underpainting, and begins by making marks indicating the outer edges of the pepper and its shadow. Next, she draws in the shapes of her composition. Nice use of the negative space, isn't it?

Once her composition is laid out, she begins blocking in the big shapes of her painting, both in the positive and negative space.

She paints quickly (she's had a lot of practice). Notice how she uses her brush strokes in the negative space to help define the positive shapes?

Notice how she moves from larger shapes to smaller ones as she develops the painting? The lovely details of highlights and small shadows on the pepper and its stem work well, because the structure of the composition underneath it works.

You can see more of her artwork online at bluecloudstudios.com, and you can read her blog at carolmarine.blogspot.com.

Thumbnail Sketches

In class, I've been talking about and demonstrating the usefulness of thumbnail sketches. They allow you to quickly work out different compositions before diving in to your painting. Often the first, most obvious ideas may not be the most interesting compositions - and drawing a series of thumbnail sketches allows you to make that discovery before you even begin your painting.

YouTube is a great resource for learning about art - you can watch demonstrations of paintings in progress and instructional videos created by artists for other artists. Here are a couple of videos where you can watch thumbnail sketches being created:

"Thumbnail Sketches," a video posted by AnnelieArt, is a 48-second example of playing around with lines and moving different compositional elements, just to see what you come up with.

"How to make a thumbnail sketch for an oil painting" is a minute-and-a-half long demo from Expertvillage of creating a values sketch (values refers to light and dark).

Both are quick, good reminders of the possibilities thumbnail sketches allow us to see.