Painting and Drawing with Mathew Lynn
Materials Guide – Portraits, Figures, Still Life, Scapes, Abstraction
If you haven’t painted before (or not very much), start by choosing a particular medium and work your way through each basic list found at the end of this guide. There is also a lot of important universal information along the way!
Some notes on the importance of all the disciplines:
It’s very important to know that all the disciplines work together in a circular way to make you a better artist! Still Life teaches you rendering of objects and the differences within objects, which for example will help you with landscapes in understanding the difference between the upper and lower parts of trees. Rendering will help you with portraits, but portraits require a certain precision in understanding the interrelated scale of shapes and features and how they need to work together, this precision will help you in every discipline in terms of control and placing things exactly where you want them, including in abstraction. Without experience in abstraction, you will be closed off to the dimension of interpretation and transformation in your still life, and so on.
Still Life > Scapes > Portraits > Abstraction > Still Life
Other important things I like to help you with:
I may often ask you about your sense of awareness and presence, and what’s happening while you’re working, in terms of analysis via intellect versus intuitive flow. Sometimes this is where crucial blockages occur. It’s also always important to remember that we are inhabiting a visual universe when we are working, that has visual meaning, that has its own visual logic and sense of play, that often necessarily escapes verbal description! So much of our practice is about becoming accustomed to this.
Another fundamental part of my teaching method is helping you to become familiar with relevant contemporary and historical artists (across all cultures) through my large body of research (that I have with me at all times), and how important this is for developing your eye and demystifying the art-making process.
Drawing, Studies & Process Sketches
Mathew likes his students to always have sketching materials on hand to make initial studies, for practicing marks, and to help when a work gets stuck, it’s usually the first thing he’ll ask you to do. Try at the very least to have a sketchbook and pencils, but colour studies are sometimes a better way to resolve something, so a small gouache or watercolour set and a cheap water media pad can be great to have on hand. You can also just do small colour studies with your oils or acrylics on oil sketch paper or cheaper water media paper.
Distinct from studies, Process Sketching in monochrome or colour is a wonderful way to loosen up before you start, but also extremely important when you want to move through variations of an idea or explore abstraction. It is a sequential exploration of ideas which allows you to clarify what is essential before you start your painting, and leaves you with a fast-moving trail of separate works, so you can observe your insight as it unfolds. It is wonderful for helping you to loosen up on the continuum from strict representation to pure abstraction. Also wonderful for finding your motifs, and understanding and developing your personal mark language. Crucially, for abstract painters it can help untangle works that sometimes have too many ideas!
For dedicated drawers not planning to paint just bring in all your normal equipment.
Follow this guide below (you don’t need everything!), sketchbook and pencils being the most important.
• A4 Sketchbook or paper
• Pencils - bring in a range such as H, B, 2B, 6B
• Staedtler rubber (we will also trim this into wedges for precision removals)
• Knife for sharpening
• 30cm Ruler (only if you think you’d like to use a grid)
• Any other drawing materials you like, such as charcoal, Conte Crayon etc.
• Gouache or Watercolour set (or just your oils or acrylics)
• Water media pad such as Art Spectrum Draw & Wash Pad 210gsm (Smooth)
• Oil sketch pad such as Canson Figueras 290gsm
• A larger cheap Cartridge Pad can also be great for big loose process sketches and practicing marks, particularly for abstraction.
Oil Painting
Note: you must use an odourless system for oil mediums and solvents!
Colours:
Essential for rendering basic skin tones, but also most things. These are also the 11 essential colours for my Colour Mixing Workshop, that covers all opaque and transparent painting in the context of the broader history of painting and all genres.
• Titanium White
• Ivory Black
• Ultramarine Blue (make sure you have standard Ultramarine)
• Yellow Ochre
• Indian Red (Red Oxide that has a purple hue)
• Burnt Umber
• Alizarin Crimson (or cheaper equivalent)
• Cadmium Red (or cheaper equivalent)
• Cadmium Yellow Light (or cheaper equivalent – if in doubt bring Lemon Yellow)
• Phthalo Blue
• Phthalo Green
Also, these additions can be very useful (or any other colours you like):
• Cadmium Orange (or cheaper equivalent)
• Cobalt Blue (or cheaper equivalent)
• Magenta
• Quinacridone Rose
• Dioxazine Purple
Art Spectrum is a good basic artist quality range. I use a number of brands depending on which version works best for me - including Old Holland, Michael Harding, Wallace Seymour.
You don’t need to buy the expensive version of a particular colour, but you will notice the difference in terms of colour strength. Also, the more expensive artist quality brands will go further, because there is more pure pigment ground into the oil and packed into each tube.
Special note for portraits and flesh:
Flesh tones, from the time of the Egyptian Fayum portraits, through to Titan, Velasquez, Manet and so on, have only ever required a very limited palette based around Lead White, Black, Earth Yellow, Earth Red, and perhaps one stronger red like Vermillion. Contemporary painting allows us to go in any direction we want, but it is essential to understand how rendering simple flesh works!
With our modern pigments we always need to start with these key colours for a basic understanding of flesh (of all kinds):
• Titanium White
• Ivory Black
• Yellow Ochre - acrylic painters use Yellow Oxide
• Indian Red - acrylic painters use Red Oxide
Also extremely useful (and often necessary):
• Cadmium Red
• Alizarin Crimson
Some of you may be familiar with the Zorn Palette, which is similar and a very good system, but I encourage people to use Indian Red first, and Cadmium Red where necessary. Indian Red has many wonderful flesh qualities that will make your experience more direct.
It can be a little confusing understanding the Red Oxides: in oils we can get all forms of it, including Indian Red (heading to violet and opaque), Light Red (heading to orange and opaque), Venetian Red (somewhere in the middle). Indian Red can also be called Persian Red, and Light Red is sometimes called English Red! Then there is Transparent Red Oxide as well!, but we use this more for glazing.
Classic opaque Indian Red carries so many secrets, not only for flesh.
Colour Mixing and Tones:
As mentioned above, these colours will give you an essential range from which you can mix and glaze virtually everything. This is covered extensively in Mathew’s 2-Day Colour Mixing Workshop. It’s also the best way to understand ‘source’ pigments that are often found combined together in one tube, but can become redundant when you understand this.
It’s very important to know when you need to paint opaquely, and when transparency is required. We tend to use both at various times in a painting, but often a painting can fall apart when there isn’t sufficient ‘Body Colour’. Body colour is the opaque part of your painting that projects physical presence outwards towards the eye, it suggests volume and weight, and gives objects a necessary three-dimensionality.
We use part of our pigment range to bring these effects of opaque colour, often based around Titanium White and Yellow Ochre. Ivory Black plays a crucial role in opaque painting, as does Indian Red. It is a system for making stable base body colours that can be tinted in any colour direction, and that behave optically like the actual objects we are perceiving. It is particularly important with flesh.
Transparent colours are used to tint your body colours, but are also essential for glazing, which is a process of applying a transparent colour over a mixed body colour (that’s already dry) to achieve subtle colour changes. For example, you can make an amazing green by applying a blue glaze over yellow body colour, and the optical effect will be completely different than if you tried to mix that green.
Tone is an essential part of making body colour. Most successful tones in a painting are created by fluency in opaque painting, and tone should be one of the cornerstones of your representation and invention. There is also a completely different system for achieving tones with transparency, through subtly adjusting body colour, or simply with thinner passages of paint. We will look at both these systems. Tonal subtlety is an essential part of how we perceive the world, it may even be more important than colour!
You will have your favourite colours, but I encourage you to try this efficient limited palette, which comes from the broader history of painting knowledge, and that takes in all genres.
Learning how to work your palette and keep it in order is also extremely important! We spend a lot of time on our palette, and you should persevere and try to solve as much of your mixing as possible there. When you make a mistake on your palette (or in your painting) you should fix it straight away until you get it right, as these mistakes tend to accumulate!
With familiarity, you’ll eventually be able to make a mental plan knowing which colours you’ll be using for a session, even down to the amounts you lay out!
Some people are taught to only mix with a palette knife, which can be great for particular things, but this can hold you back with your fluency and feel, by putting an extra step between you and just mixing directly with your brushes, or when pushing mixed colours subtly in certain directions, and finally in developing an instinct for what’s actually in your brush. Everything gets back to the brush - introducing medium, how you load it, how you unload it, and the increasing sophistication with which you use it at the mixing stage, and then onwards to making your marks. The wisdom needs to be in the brush.
This is distinct from palette knife and spatula painters, whose wisdom needs to be deeply in those tools!
Finally (and gently!): it’s important for you to know that some teachers only teach you colour from within the boundaries of their own practice, having very little experience in say traditional flesh or still life for example, this is not the way I teach! This colour range is designed for you to be able to handle everything from a good foundation, and that includes a crucial understanding of Ivory Black.
I conceive of painting in multiple (and often contradictory) ways, but I would be most closely connected in my technical lineage with the Australian Tonalists, learning by osmosis with a very dear friend who studied directly under one of Max Meldrum’s students. They were often laughably dogmatic, but it produced one of our greatest and most poetic painters in Clarice Beckett. They revered Velazquez, and a kind of direct vision and experience where colour and tone is perceived very quickly, and applied directly with great skill and simplicity.
Oil Brushes:
It is crucial to have a good range of brushes for a variety of marks and purposes. Oil painters need more brushes because it’s best to keep each colour you use on a separate brush, especially for the areas that require more detailed work where you are painting multiple colours and tones. It’s important to avoid the habit of cleaning one brush each time you want to change colour.
You will also use different brushes at different stages of the painting. For example, when ‘blocking in’ at the start of a painting, you will use large brushes (cheap ones are better) that will help you sketch the composition in quickly, and that you can be a bit rough with. Later on, you will move on to more precise brushes to paint details, these ones you can spend a bit more money on.
As a guide you should always try to use the biggest brush possible for a passage of painting, this will build your fluency and sense of energy and mark making in your work, and will stop you from getting bogged down unnecessarily and imprisoned by a small brush. In time you will develop your favourite range, and specific types for specific things!
Oil painting brushes are larger (longer handle) and have a different numbering system to the shorter handle watercolour brushes, your local art shop will be able to explain this to you.
Brush Range:
In general, it’s good to have this range of sizes and numbers which you can spread across the various types of hog bristle brush, described below.
• #12 x 1
• #10 x 1
• #8 x 2
• #6 x 2
• #4 x 2
• #2 x 2
• #1 x 2
As a simple guide, the big brushes (#12 & #10) can be Cheap Hog Bristle 582 ROUND (also great for dry blending), and the remainder can be a mixture of cheap and better quality Hog Bristle ROUND and Hog Bristle FILBERT.
Brushes are a big investment - you will probably do most of your general to detailed painting with #6, #4 and #2, so as long as you can keep colours separate in this range, washing other brushes as you go in class can work, and you can keep your costs down.
For Still Life, Hog Bristle FILBERTS will give you more control and mark variety than anything else for this ‘detail’ range (#6, #4, #2). You may like them for Portraits also.
As extras, I always have a dry #12, #10, #8 & #6 Cheap Hog Bristle ROUND (based on the Eterna 582 shape) on hand for dry blending. They are so inexpensive, and so useful!
Brush Types:
Cheap Hog Bristle ROUND (Eterna 582 shape) – you can actually paint most things with this type predominantly in your range, but they can be very difficult with details, and it depends on the marks you like to make. A round brush is much more versatile generally, and these cheaper ones can be used for most of your blocking-in and preliminary work, which can be more punishing on brushes. They also have a very rounded shape, so can be excellent later on as a dry brush and cheap blender for manipulating the wet paint surface.
Good Quality Hog Bristle ROUND – the most versatile brush, because the better-quality ones come with a pronounced point. They can be very gestural and expansive, and then very accurate for finer marks from moment to moment, which will help you with your fluency and speed. Sometimes on good days you may find yourself using very few brushes, helped by the versatility of your brush.
Good Quality Hog Bristle FILBERT – this is a fantastic brush combining a rounded shape with a chisel profile like flat brushes. It’s good to have a some of these in your medium to small sizes. They can make nice sharp points and lines, as well as soft shapes. Some people might like to use them exclusively for details, and even large ones for blocking in.
Cheap or Good Quality Hog Bristle FLAT – flat brushes can be very difficult, because you will always be fighting with the pronounced sharp chisel shape that they make, nevertheless it’s nice to have some of them for particular uses and tight corners, particularly the smaller ones in the range above. Some people like to paint exclusively with these types of marks, so it’s no problem if that’s your preference!
Synthetic Hog Bristle ROUND, FLAT or FILBERT – there are some extremely good brushes available made from a kind of synthetic hog bristle, you may like to try some of these also. They tend to be more expensive so you’ll want to look after them and keep them clean. The best I’ve found is the NEEF 95 Stiff Synthetic, which come in all shapes.
Water Media Synthetics in a variety of shapes – can be great for particular uses and types of oil painting, especially if you are working small, or your work is extremely fine, but they’re generally too soft to use with oil paint and will be VERY frustrating!
Please also bring any other brushes that you like to use! People working expressively and in abstraction will have their favourite brushes and implements for their personal mark-making.
Brush Washing:
Everyone’s least favourite part of the day! - but it is essential that you get into good habits with cleaning your oil brushes, because a badly washed brush can make your next painting session unpleasant, and even stressful. Try not to come to class with hard brushes!
Brushes need to be able to unload what you spend all that time mixing, and in an optimal way. If you have residual oil, medium or paint drying in the bristles, it can become very difficult to load and unload the paint, and the brush actually starts scratching everything off.
You might like to think about bringing a proper portable brush washer with strainer to class, they can be found for less than $30 on eBay. They can be handy with cleaning on the go and have a sealed lid for easy transport.
The modern quick-drying mediums are very hard on brushes, so you need to be extra vigilant during your session to see if your brush needs a wash on the go.
If you’re taking your brushes home for final wash, wrap them in glad wrap to slow the drying process, and wash them thoroughly with a proper brush washer that has a strainer. A jar with solvent won’t really give you a good clean, because you will always be stirring up the oily sediment with your washing action.
In my studio I still use Mineral Turps for brush cleaning (with a respirator) because there is often a large pile to wash! I use a large-scale oil brush washer with a raised grill, so the heavy pigment is separated. They are lidded so you can keep fumes to a minimum.
Finally, wash your brushes with a simple soap and warm water, I use a Sunlight bar. This helps get the remaining dirty and oily solvent out of your brush, and the bristles will be nice and soft again. This doesn’t have to be long and laborious!, just dip the brush in warm water, rub it into the soap, and lather it up on a hard surface, then rinse.
Oil Mediums & Solvents:
Working in a class situation, we always need to use an odourless system when oil painting.
Quick-drying odourless medium and artist quality odourless solvent is often the easiest option, my personal favourite being Galkyd medium and Gamsol solvent by Gamblin.
Odourless solvent is relatively expensive in general, but Gamsol tends to be reasonably priced within the range available. You still need to be careful with odourless solvents as they still have low toxicity.
Oil Mediums help the pigment to stay bound when the paint is thinned out. But working with a medium can be very much about personal preference for the type of surface you’re after. Galkyd is essentially a glaze medium, and will potentially make surfaces very glossy depending how you use it. For certain types of exacting traditional painting you may want this, so you can see all the tones properly, but in expressive painting you might like for there to be beautiful variations of the paint surface, or for it all to be generally quite matte. This is where you can experiment with cutting the medium with solvent to maintain some binding quality, but to avoid glossiness.
Other mediums are also available to help with this, but it’s very much about your own personal experimentation and types of surfaces you’re after. There are also some completely non-toxic oil mediums available such as the Gamblin Solvent-Free Fluid Painting Medium.
You can simply use Artists Refined Linseed Oil as a medium (nearly every oil colour is ground in it), but the drying time is much slower, and it may hold you up while you’re waiting for it to dry. Also, whites will yellow when Linseed Oil is added to them, and mediums are constructed for minimal yellowing.
As a general rule, try to avoid using only solvent as a medium, this can be Ok right at the start for sketching on, but pigment needs to be bound, and you need to develop an awareness around this, and knowing what to expect if you want to break this rule.
At the same time, don’t get too worried about ‘Fat over Lean’ in your oil painting so that you’re afraid to do any work! As long as you have a simple awareness around the structure of layers and pigments in your painting, it’s very rare to have major problems. Mathew covers this in his Colour Mixing Workshop.
Or, you may simply be a painter that just loves using paint as it is with an impasto technique.
Oil Painting Materials
• Drawing, Studies & Process Sketches (see above)
• Colours (see above)
• Brushes (see above)
• Palette - could be disposable, but it’s better and far less frustrating if it’s a modern rectangular board shape (roughly A3) or the traditional kidney shape - make sure your palette has plenty of mixing space. Two cheap pieces of prepared board in A3 size sitting on a table is just as good, the spare one can be handy when you run out of space but want to keep those colours on the first board going.
• Double Dipper - for separate medium and solvent. Get the open style with the widest openings so you can get your big brushes easily in and out.
• Mediums & Solvents (see above)
• Rags, paper towels - plenty of these
• Cotton buds - extremely helpful for subtle removal of paint in tight spots
• Spare containers - for solvent, or mixing things on the go.
• Palette knife - you may like to have couple of these in different shapes.
• Anything else you like to make marks with or push paint around, such as spatulas, scrapers etc.
• A canvas or canvas board (or a few of them) - oil painting paper is also fine, but can be more difficult to work on and transport.
• It is always a good idea to wear disposable Nitrile gloves (non-latex and tougher) when painting and handling oil paint and mediums, they’re at most supermarkets.
• Use your GAMSOL or odourless solvent for clean-up in class.
• You may also want to bring in a proper stainless steel style oil brush washer with strainer and a sealable lid. They can be found for less than $30 on eBay, and it means (if necessary) you can wash some of your brushes on the go properly, and also carry it home without spills.
• Taking your brushes home wrapped in glad wrap for a proper clean and wash is probably the best option, as described above.
Acrylic Materials
Colours - similar advice as the oil colours above, but be aware that Acrylics sometimes don’t come in exactly the same colour names. If in doubt have these essential colours at least.
• Titanium White
• Ivory Black
• Ultramarine Blue (make sure you have standard Ultramarine)
• Yellow Oxide
• Red Oxide
• Burnt Umber
• Alizarin Crimson (or cheaper equivalent)
• Cadmium Red (or cheaper equivalent)
• Cadmium Yellow Light (or cheaper equivalent – if in doubt bring Lemon Yellow)
• Phthalo Blue
• Phthalo Green
Matisse (Flow or Structure) are good artist quality options. Bring in your normal range and your favourites also!
Brushes – follow the basic range and advice above, but you’ll only need one of each size because you are constantly washing your brush. Stiffer bristle brushes are good with acrylics, but you may prefer to have predominantly synthetic brushes for more control (in long handle), at least for the brushes you use most. I find the Synthetic Hog Bristle Brushes mentioned above particularly wonderful for acrylic! NEEF 95 Stiff Synthetic have a perfect balance of firmness combined with optimal flow from the brush.
It can be very frustrating working finely or in an Old-Masterly way with acrylic on things like flesh, so having the best brushes possible goes a long way to easing this frustration.
Watercolour style brushes can work well for certain types of acrylic painting, for finer details, but you will still want brushes that have a certain stiffness so you can push your paint around and work with freedom and flow.
Bring any acrylic style brushes you like.
Medium – can be a basic Acrylic Painting Medium, Gel Medium, Impasto Medium etc. I personally like to use just water.
• Drawing, Studies & Process Sketches (see above)
• Acrylic palette/s with a flat surface, or just an A3 piece of Perspex (and perhaps a second one), plenty of mixing space is always better!
• Spare containers and a water container
• Rags, sponges, paper towels, cotton buds, scraper, or anything else you like to use.
• A canvas or canvas board (or a few of them), you can also use heavy water medium paper
• I always like to have a cheaper water media pad (at least 210gsm) with me for quick colour studies and problem solving.
• You can also have an even cheaper Cartridge Paper Pad for fast process sketches and practicing marks you might want to make in your main painting.
Important! In class we need to discard the bulk of unwanted acrylic paint by scraping onto paper towel, not washing everything down the sink.
Gouache & Watercolours
Gouache may have some different colour names but refer to the acrylic colour above for reference. Try to get Red Oxide for your earth red, this is especially important for portraits and the Colour Mixing exercises.
Windsor & Newton Gouache comes in more or less all the colours listed above, including Cadmiums, Alizarin Crimson and ‘Red Ochre’, but it’s an expensive option. Art Spectrum has a simplified range without a Red Oxide. Daler-Rowney Gouache has a somewhat simplified list also where you’ll have to do some translating, but they do have an Indian Red.
Gouache is also, in many respects, more like oil painting, because unlike acrylics which always dry waterproof, gouache can be continually pushed around and reanimated.
Gouache is also extremely good for colour mixing studies, though you are better to do this with your principle medium.
I find Gouache wonderful for small colour studies and process sketches!
Watercolour colours follow a different system and can be quite specific, favouring particular transparent pigments, but you can use any that you have, and Mathew can give you advice on this, or simply use a basic watercolour set and you should be covered.
Watercolour most closely resembles glazing in oil painting, so can be wonderful for getting the feel of working transparently. The most important skill in watercolour is the dialogue between the white of the paper, and how it illuminates your colours.
• Drawing, Studies & Process Sketches (see above)
• Appropriate palettes for colours and mixing, make sure you have plenty of flat space too.
• Water container and extra containers for mixing
• Rags, paper towels, cotton buds
• Synthetic watercolour brushes in a range of sizes: fine, medium and a large.
Also, a Mop type brush and a larger squirrel brush can be wonderful, other water media brushes such as a wide flat brush, and Japanese or Chinese style brushes. Bring all your favourites!
Remember that you are making a variety of marks - sometimes you are covering a large flat area, sometimes you’re working on fine details, at other times it’s nice to have a brush that is loaded up but with a very fine point to work expansively and with details at the same time.
• Watercolour paper or watercolour pad.
• Cheaper water media pads are also great to have around for experiments and to practice marks. Try an Art Spectrum Draw & Wash Pad 210gsm for studies, or an even cheaper Cartridge Paper Pad for fast process sketches and to practice marks.