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 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 > Scape > Portraits > Abstraction > Still Life
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.
• 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
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
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 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.
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.