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| Pickled Eggplant - Fiona Morgan. An example of square brush in my work. |
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| Detail of Bastien Lepage's Sarah Bernhardt showing the loose brushwork that has influenced so many modern painters today. |
The impressionists really smashed the idea of hiding every brushstroke, but the idea had been gaining ground for quite some time. The artists Velaquez, Bastien Lepage and even as far back as Rembrandt had been toying with letting the painterlyness of paint do the talking.
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| Angela Morgan (no, not a relative!) makes a real feature of square brush technique in her work. |
Square brush or square touch technique is a version of the broken brushstroke technique the Impressionists were famous for, and it is common today.
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| Detail of a Joe Sorren painting showing off the square brush backgrounds I love in his work. |
Usually using brights, flats or filberts, the flat of the paintbrush is used to lay down squarish strokes of paint directly, unblended, in a jigsaw pattern.
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| Aldro T Hibbard, and many of the Rockport school of painting are characterised by a square brush technique. |
It gives a chunky feeling which is great for modelling structure. Different planes of an object can be deliniated easily with different temperature strokes and different values.
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| Arthur Streeton showcasing the atmospheric quality of square brush. |
It easily gives soft edges useful for atmosphere and light.
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| Daily painter Layne Cook with a dramatic square touch example showing the removal of detail. |
The size of the squares eliminates distracting detail and therefore has a unifying effect on the painting as a whole. Anything smaller than one square stroke has to be really important to be included. This eliminates visual clutter, focussing the viewer on the most important aspects of the painting.
It gives a pixellating vibrancy to the surface of the painting. Each stroke can be a slightly different colour and angle which makes the painting appear to sing with more colour and detail than is actually there. The eye detects colour changes and hints of detail. Square touch is a way of fooling the brain into adding what it thinks should be there. Thank you impressionistic heritage.
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| Dean Cornwell with an excellent example of fooling the eye into seeing more detail than is actually there. Look at the greys - the timbers and the ground. |
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| Sir Henry Raeburn, Scottish portrait painter, managed to subtley use square touch throughout his career of figurative painting, despite being ahead of his time and the difficulty of this technique in portraiture. It's much more suited to still life and landscape. |
http://stapletonkearns.blogspot.com/2010/07/more-on-brushstroke.html
There are loads of artists who make great use of this painterly technique. Know of an artist whose work is loaded with square brush? Tell us! Leave a comment.
This article is one in an ongoing series of technical articles for artists, all archived together and accessible from here. The topics range from details on materials, to the business of art, to specific art techniques. Please make use of this resource.
There are loads of artists who make great use of this painterly technique. Know of an artist whose work is loaded with square brush? Tell us! Leave a comment.
More art technique articles
This article is one in an ongoing series of technical articles for artists, all archived together and accessible from here. The topics range from details on materials, to the business of art, to specific art techniques. Please make use of this resource.
And remember to check out my artworks on Flickr, and have an insider peek at my life as an artist on Facebook.
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| Photo by gearyste |
It began innocently enough with the decision to do an inventory of all my oil paint colours. This led to an investigation into pigment codes, the internationally standardised colour index names such as PV 14 (that one is Cobalt Violet). Then it was down the rabbit hole of information searching for drying times, lightfastness, opacity, working properties, toxicity, recommendations, conflicting information, incomplete information, current colours, discontinued colours, new colours... I resurfaced about 9 days later.
I'll summarise what I found. It won't take 9 days.
I'll summarise what I found. It won't take 9 days.
There are some great resources online if you want to find out about the colours that you use. No need to search around, I have some gems lined up.
All of the resources here I have printed out and put into a folder of their own for my easy reference, along with the pigment charts from the paint manufacturers that I use or like, my inventory of the paints I have and would like to try, and my super dooper spreadsheet of all the most relevent info in one at-a-glance chart...
The excellent online resources
Art School At Home - a blog with an excellent overview of common pigments in each colour group. Written by an oil painter learning her way through the maze of information. Ideal as a first stop. The link is to the first post on the colour groups.
Pigments for making Artist's Paint - Paintmaking.com - the pigment section of this website is extraordinarily useful. Lots of information that is useful to a painter (oils, acrylic, watercolour, fresco). Goes into more depth, covers more pigments than Art School At Home and is still very accessible reading.
Oils and Pigments by Jan Esmann - pdf - free download made available by this artist who makes his own paints. Very useful, eyeopening, if more technically informative than most artists will need. Contains the sort of information that an oil painter would be interested in. A bit of history, working properties, working lightfastness, do's and don'ts etc.
Color Index Pigment Information Database - this website is a world unto itself. All the pigments used for colour are listed, broken into their colour groups (yellow, red etc). There are links to manufacturers of most of the colours, a little bit of history on the pigment, official lightfastness, toxicity, and general notes.
Dick Blick Art Supplies - on the page of each individual tubed colour is a tab of pigment info. This covers a lot of pigments. Very handy.
Dick Blick Art Supplies - on the page of each individual tubed colour is a tab of pigment info. This covers a lot of pigments. Very handy.
The Artist's Handbook by Pip Seymour - pdf - I didn't actually print this one out, but I did find it contained quite a bit of useful information when I was researching. A lot of what is in here is covered already in the other resources.
The super dooper bit
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| Photo by moron noodle |
There was no one place where I could find all the information I wanted, at a glance, for oil painting. So I put it together myself. It is gathered from the above resources and about a gazillion google searches for each individual pigment. Though this is as comprehensive as I could make it, I am sure you will be able to find the odd pigment here and there that has been missed. Sorry, there are a lot of pigments in use. All the most common ones are covered. This is what really took up the 9 days of investigating.
It's a print-friendly chart, organised by colour groups, with colour index name, common paint name, oil paint drying time, opacity, useful notes and working lightfastness. Working lightfastness? Yes. Many pigments have a high lightfastness rating on their own but fade in tints or mixes. In practice this means that they fade, as a colour is usually mixed with another.
The Oil Paint Pigment Chart - everything at a glance
You may download this pdf chart right here. Oil Paint Pigment Chart. Pass it around if you please.
Hopefully it will be useful during your next paint shopping trip.
More art technique articles
This article is one in an ongoing series of technical articles for artists, all archived together and accessible from here. The topics range from details on materials, to the business of art, to specific art techniques. Please make use of this resource.
And remember to check out my artworks on Flickr, and have an insider peek at my life as an artist on Facebook.
Wine, food and painting go together rather well, even if I am a little biased. The Barossa Fine Art Exhibition is part of The Barossa Vintage Festival 2011. It is a painting competition/prize based in the famous Barossa valley wine region in South Australia.
The competition powers-that-be have a stated interest in the 'diversity of contemporary abstracts'. As you know, I have a tendency toward creating abstract paintings and I'm hoping one of my foodie inspired abstracts might be a better-than-crapshoot chance in this competition and catch the eye of the judges from this food and wine region. But which painting?
This is where you can help. I have a hunch which one to send in, but as this whole idea of entering art competitions is new to me, I would love some external opinions. Maybe you and the judges will agree!
So bearing in mind that there will be no information other than the title and artist name to accompany the painting (just like in the poll below), which of these works best captures the spirit of its title?
Two clicks. One on your vote, one to submit your choice. That's it! Along with a heartfelt thank you :)
I'll let you know which one ends up flying my flag.
The competition powers-that-be have a stated interest in the 'diversity of contemporary abstracts'. As you know, I have a tendency toward creating abstract paintings and I'm hoping one of my foodie inspired abstracts might be a better-than-crapshoot chance in this competition and catch the eye of the judges from this food and wine region. But which painting?
This is where you can help. I have a hunch which one to send in, but as this whole idea of entering art competitions is new to me, I would love some external opinions. Maybe you and the judges will agree!
So bearing in mind that there will be no information other than the title and artist name to accompany the painting (just like in the poll below), which of these works best captures the spirit of its title?
Two clicks. One on your vote, one to submit your choice. That's it! Along with a heartfelt thank you :)
I'll let you know which one ends up flying my flag.
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| Photo by g0upil |
I pick up a brush, determine which section of the painting I am to apply my attention to, and get to work. I complete element after element in highly focused concentration until the entire painting is done. I put the brush down. I am exhausted, dizzy. Yet it feels as though maybe 10, perhaps 40 minutes has elapsed. I check the clock. 4 hours.
Being in the zone. It is well known that top athletes are required to find their way into the zone as part of their occupation. The same is true of artists.
Many artists will tell you that time stops when painting. Personally I find painting to be meditative and soothing. I like these aspects of painting but I'm not so keen on discovering my entire day/evening/morning has vanished.
For me, painting is far easier and more effective than traditional meditation to stop the chatter of the mind. It's quite a zen-like experience, albeit exhausting after so many unbroken hours. It's all I can do to keep up with my minds instructions to have the image fall out of my head and onto the canvas. The bottleneck is physical. The properties of the paint itself and how fast I can move.
Being in the zone. It is well known that top athletes are required to find their way into the zone as part of their occupation. The same is true of artists.
Many artists will tell you that time stops when painting. Personally I find painting to be meditative and soothing. I like these aspects of painting but I'm not so keen on discovering my entire day/evening/morning has vanished.
For me, painting is far easier and more effective than traditional meditation to stop the chatter of the mind. It's quite a zen-like experience, albeit exhausting after so many unbroken hours. It's all I can do to keep up with my minds instructions to have the image fall out of my head and onto the canvas. The bottleneck is physical. The properties of the paint itself and how fast I can move.
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