Oil Painting Demo Fun Class at Albany Hill

My oil painting demo at Albany Hill, California, went well in April. I had a nice local area crowd show up for my outdoor demonstration of oil painting techniques and plein air methods.


I had designed the hour-long class in the Bay Area to highlight basic oil painting materials and show beginning methods for understanding oil painting. I was pleased with the curiosity and enthusiasm, as many people had tried watercolor but wanted to explore oils. A few people had experience with oil painting and were eager to go deeper.

Different oil painting set-ups, easels, and paint boxes for outdoor painting. Plus a table full of oil painting materials to show absolute beginners.

The students told me that oil painting can be intimidating because of the huge selection of materials you encounter when walking into an art store. Where to start? So I designed this class to simplify and organize the variety of painting materials, and let students experiment with different methods to see what they liked. I am a great believer in having a firm grasp of technique, so the student can then be creative and go their own way with high quality results.

Oil painting materials on location at a beautiful landscape scene, Albany Hill Park. This event was co-hosted by Friends of Albany Hill.
One brand of modern portable painting box. I present a variety of different makes and models of outdoor painting easels and boxes.

Traditional "Julian easel" and my old paint box.
I show students how painting supports can be stored inside the paint box even when wet with fresh oil paint.
I explain how I made color charts of oil paint swatches.

Topics such as how to prepare different surfaces to paint on (canvas, wooden panel, cotton rag paper), layering, drying time, which colors dry quickly and which dry slowly were discussed--to name a few. People had many, many questions, which is a good thing and shows the need for a longer class.

We will schedule more in-depth workshops of a half day and full day in the next month, and return to the area. Plus get the students themselves painting with these materials. They were eager to pick up the brushes and start making art! See my art website at https://lcunningham-art.com.

Comments

  1. 1 click dissertation reviewMay 13, 2017 at 1:34 AM

    Its showing from the images that you really had fun in your first oil painting demo class and learnt many things. The setup seems quite nice.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paleoart

Image
Paleoart is a fascinating field, one of my favorites, where imagination is used in heavy doses along with scientific accuracy to try to reconstruct scenes of past life and landscapes. I enjoy the challenge of researching the fossil record, paleontological studies, and comparing them to living ecosystems and wildlife in order to bring ancient scenes to life, whether a century in the past or a hundred million years ago. I painted this mural in oil on canvas years ago for Badlands National Park, working with park staff who provided me with detailed material to work from. It was a fun project. I favor working in oil paint to achieve a glow and luster of color that is still hard to match in digital media, such as Photoshop-created art. My background as a Paleontology Major at the University of California, Berkeley, helped inform how I researched the project, and my graduate work in scientific illustration at the University of California at Santa Cruz gave me many methods to choose fro...
Read more

Explosion of Interest in Block Diagrams

Image
Pen and ink, colored pencil on paper. I have not posted here in a while, because I am trying to crowdsource funds to write new books and publish them through Patreon.com lately. But when I posted this geology-hydrology block diagram on my Twitter page , it went viral.  That surprised me, as this was an old-fashioned, hand-drawn illustration. But it raised some interesting questions about the loss of traditional artistic techniques, and methods of presenting scientific information. Perhaps computer-driven digital graphics still lack something (unless you have a gigantic budget to hire Hollywood film-quality graphic designers).  I whipped this block diagram illustration out easily in a day. I started with a rough pencil sketch, using the principles of perspective.  Then I traced over the pencil lines with pen and ink. Lastly, I colored in the diagram with colored pencils. On paper. Seems primitive nowadays. But the response from social media has been tremend...
Read more

Art Prints Now Available

Image
I have a collection of limited edition prints of various oil paintings, many of which are illustrated in my book A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California (Heyday: 2010). These are printed on a professional press with archival ink on microceramic paper, and each has a label and protected by a clear sleeve, ready for framing. I adjusted each print during the process to match my original oil paintings as closely as possible. Go to this link on my art website to view the prints:   https://lcunningham-art.com/collections/102217 As a fundraiser towards publishing my future manuscripts, such as a possible volume 2 on the ecological history of California and Nevada, I am reducing the price on these prints. Email me to purchase prints and I will ship them to you by Priority mail. You can mail a check to me at PO Box 70, Beatty NV 89003, or drop a payment into my PayPal account . I only have one or two of each, so collect them while you can!
Read more