Term: Muller

A heavy stone or piece of wood, metal, or glass used to grind and mix pigment against a slab of similar material. A muller (typically glass) is used when making paint by hand. Mullers help grind the pigment to the desired level of refinement and to mix the pigment with binder to make paint. The base of a muller has a very fine roughness or tooth and is slightly convex to encourage the pigment to slide between the muller and the grinding surface.

Quote: Lay One Out, Then Put It Aside

"Why don't you, if as you say your first layout is good and you begin to ruin it after two or three hours, why don't you lay one out, then put it aside? Start another picture. Then when you come back to the first, you can see just what you need to finish it, and you can go at it with cold intelligence rather than the heat of the beginning - and you won't burn it up. As though you were looking at another's work. It's the minute you take possession of an idea that the idea departs and it always will, to the end of time."

Harvey Dunn

Video: How to Draw Facial Features

Artist Stan Prokopenko continues his series of drawing videos by sharing how to draw facial features.

Length: 55 minutes

















You may also enjoy additional guidance from Stan's site: Head Any Angle, Eyes, Nose, Lips, Ears, Hair.

Term: Impress

Impressing is to indent or alter the surface of of a support (especially paper). When the surface is changed by pressing an object into it, you can say your are making an impression of the same.

A variety of tools can be used to make impressions; almost any object with a hard pointed end can be used for this purpose (such as, a burnisher, pencil, paint brush handle, or fingernail). 

In contrast, when printing the term "impression" describes a single piece of paper on which an image has been placed.

Term: Wax Bloom

A whitish haze that appears on the surface of a heavily worked colored pencil drawings. If an artist uses the colored pencil with light pressure, there may be little or no haze as a result. The cloudiness is caused when the wax binder in the pencil led rises to the surface of the artwork. It is most apparent in dark colors but is present to some degree with all colors. Wax bloom can appear overnight or over the course of several days.

Wax bloom can be removed by lightly rubbing the artwork with a paper towel, a clean cloth, or a facial tissue without lotion. A light spray coating of fixative or retouch varnish will prevent bloom from forming on a picture.

Quote: Do Not Set The Same Palette Whatever Subject You Paint

"Do not set the same palette whatever the subject you are going to paint. Some of the colours may not be needed; but if you have them set, you may be tempted to use more colours than are necessary, and this will disturb the breadth of your colouring. The fewer colours used, the more harmonious and large in effect your colouring will be."

Harold Speed

Quote: Artists Get Better By Learning From Their Work

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: On the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work in the 'quantity' group: fifty pounds of pots rated an 'A', forty pounds a 'B' and so on. Those being graded on 'quality,' however, needed to produce only one pot--albeit a perfect one--to get an 'A'. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the 'quantity' group was busy turning out piles of work--and learning from their mistakes--the 'quality' group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Artists get better by sharpening their skills or by acquiring new ones; they get better by learning to work, and learning from their work.”

David Bayles and Ted Orland

Quote: You Have A Choice Between Certainty And Uncertainty.

"You have a choice ... between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot - and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty."

David Bayles and Ted Orland

Term: Alizarin

A synthetic coal-tar dye used in the manufacture of red pigments. In its crystal form alizarin appears as a reddish-orange and as a brownish-yellow in powder form. It is one of the earliest known dyes. Historically it was obtained from from the roots of the madder plant but is now synthetically derived from anthraquinone.

Alizarin is the main ingredient for the manufacture of the madder lake pigments known to painters as Rose Madder and Alizarin Crimson. Alizarin in the most common usage of the term has a deep red color, but the term is also part of the name for several related non-red dyes, such as Alizarine Cyanine Green and Alizarine Brilliant Blue.

Term: Acrylic

A paint in which a polymer emulsion, based on synthetic resin, serves as the binder. Acrylic paint is a fast drying paint that forms a tough nontoxic flexible film when dry. Acrylic paints are diluted with water but become water-resistant when fully cured. Depending on how much the paint is diluted, a finished acrylic painting can resemble a watercolor, an oil painting, or have its own unique characteristics not attainable with other media.

Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden invented the first acrylic paint under the brand name Magna in the 1940s. A waterborne acrylic paint called Aquatec soon followed. Water-soluble artists' acrylic paints became commercially available in the 1950s, offered by Liquitex, with high-viscosity paints similar to those made today becoming available in the early 1960s.

Book: Landscape Painting Techniques - Painting Light and Shadow in Your Landscape Art

Click here to view.

Author: Artist Daily
Location: SGVA Drive

If you have been in search of free landscape painting lessons, Artist Daily has you covered! Whether you prefer watercolor, oil, or another medium for your landscape paintings, all 21 landscape painting lessons will help define your skills and enhance your paintings.

From the canvas to your completed masterpiece, this downloadable guide to landscape painting is perfect for the aspiring landscape artist, whether beginner or experienced. Learn alongside two skilled landscape artists as they share their best kept secrets and unique techniques to help you develop your own style of painting landscapes. See your landscape artwork come to life with the help of the landscape painting lessons in this free eBook.

Book: Learn How to Draw People - 15 Expert Tips on How to Draw a Person

Click here to view.

Author: Artist Daily
Location: SGVA Drive

Do you want to learn all the tricks to successfully drawing people? The experts at Artist Daily have gathered their best tips and techniques in this illustrated free eBook. Download this amazing resource and learn human drawing with renowned artists Tony Ryder and Sandra Angelo. The first part of this free tutorial will walk you through how to draw hands, a face, and how to render the envelope and gesture of the human body. Ryder explains classic graphite techniques, which will help you learn how to draw people. This is a more modern take on drawing people with graphite. So whether you are trying to take a classic approach to drawing people or a more modern approach, this eBook will give you all the knowledge you need to do it successfully!

Quote: Little Doubts And Second Thoughts Don't Want You To Work

'When you get an idea and you sit down to sketch it, right away all the little doubts and second thoughts and limitations that have been hanging around waiting for you to start some positive action, - one may be over in the corner sleeping, others are playing about - well, when they see you get to work with this idea they come and look over your shoulder, one will say, "Oh, no, you can't do that, that's not going to work." And another will say, "You don't paint enough," and so on. Say to them, "I'm only playing; you go on back to your corners." And, honestly when you do just play with an idea, they do go away and leave you. They don't want you to work, that's all. Play around with those little sketches, saying to yourself, "Now, if I were a really first-rate artist, how would I express this idea?" Then keep playing around till you think, "that's the way I really believe a first class artist might do it!" When you begin on the drawing itself, still you keep saying, "Now I wonder how would a finished high-grade man paint or draw this?" "Why, I believe he'd do it like this," and first thing you know it's painted!'

Harvey Dunn

Quote: Take Things From Nature To Express An Idea Of Our Own

"We don't need to express nature. It's already expressed! But if we can take nature or things from nature to express an idea of our own, then nature is useful. Paint this water the color you'd like to see it, rather than the color you think it ought to be or is. To the end that it may be a handsome canvas."

Harvey Dunn

Quote: Don't Be Content When A Thing Is Pretty Good

"Don't be content when a thing is pretty good. Stay with it until it is well. Be content to destroy it again and again until it is just as substantive and full of form as it can be. Not as full as you can make it. But as full as it can be."

Harvey Dunn

Question: Should artists include a date with their signature?

Dates help capture an artist's progression and development over time. Serious collectors like dates because they help establish the authenticity of a work. Unfortunately, a date in the signature tends to make a painting age over time. While this may be advantageous for antique works, some collectors only want to buy recently completed art from living artists.

One way to deal with these idiosyncrasies is to date artwork on the reverse side of a painting. This allows an artist to preserve a record of his or her work without aging the visual image.

Question: When did artists start signing paintings?

Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen in her book entitled How to Read Paintings gives the following answer to this question:

"The importance attached to the notion of the individual from the 14th century onwards and the idea that masterpieces are the product of the unique imagination of individuals of genius contributed to popularizing the practice of signing work and indeed made it all but obligatory."

Quote: We Value Art Because Of Its Revelation Of Life's Experience

"Art cannot be separated from life. It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable, and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life's experience."

Robert Henri

Term: Color Scheme

In color theory, a color scheme is a group of colors used together in one media. Color schemes are used to create a particular style, mood or appeal. When a color scheme is pleasing to the eye, it is said to strike a color chord or are described as being harmonious. Color schemes used in painting are often based on their relationships to one another on the color wheel. A few of the more common harmonious color schemes are as follows:

• Monochromatic - Variations of one color, such as red, from pink to burgundy, or blue, from cerulean to ultramarine
• Analogous - Any three to five colors that are side-by-side on the color wheel, such as yellow, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, and red
• Triadic - Three colors that are equidistant from each other on the color wheel, such as red, yellow and blue, or orange, green and violet
• Complementary - Any two colors opposite each other on the color wheel, such as yellow and purple, orange and blue, or red and green

Term: Counterchange

Counterchange is the reversal of value relationships between a form and its background which occurs from one end of the form to another. Counterchange is a visual phenomenon that is based on the way our eyes adjust to extreme value contrasts. The effect is that the form appears light when in front of a dark object and dark when in front of a light object.

Artists use counterchange when a tree trunk appears light against its surroundings near the ground, and then switches to become darker than the sky nearer the top. See how Edward Seago has arranged the following passage so that the trunk of the most important tree sits in front of the dark grouping of trees behind it. A little further up the same trunk is dark and the landscape is now light behind it. Then several of the branches above that are counterchanged against where the trunk itself becomes dark.

Term: Inattentional Blindness

Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is the failure to notice a fully-visible object because attention is given to another object, task or event. People experience this blindness when they have preconceived expectations about what they are seeing or when they focus on one thing that causes them to miss another. This phenomenon is what magicians exploit to accomplish their illusions.

Artists must learn to overcome inattentional blindness to become fully aware of their surroundings. This means learning to see things as they are and not how we expect them to be. For example, a new artists may perceive the sky as blue or the grass as green even when the visual information they see contradicts these ideas. We think we see everything but in reality we only see those things that we pay attention to, missing everything else. Our minds fill-in the missing parts of the scene with what we know or imagine. It is inattentiveness that allows the illusion of representational art to fool people into thinking they are seeing something that is real when in fact the art only mimics reality.

Quote: Approach Your Subject In All Humility

"Approach your subject in all humility and reverence - make yourself highly sensitive to its beauty."

Charles Hawthorne

Quote: An Artist Must Possess Nature

"An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language."

Quote: Listen To The Language Of Nature

"It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures."

Question: What is optical blending?

Optical blending, or color mixing, is a visual phenomenon that occurs when small amounts of unmixed colors are placed side by side on a painting. Rather than see the individual colors, the viewer perceives a single color that is a blend of the others. The perceived color is usually one you would see if the color pigments were mixed. The primary difference is that when the pigments are mixed they lose intensity. When colors are mixed optically in the viewers mind they retain their intensity and tend to appear brighter.

This type of color mixing was practiced by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. The following painting techniques rely on this type of blending: scumbling, stippling, broken color and glazing.

Optical blending may sound like something unfamiliar but it is actually something we experience every day. For example, if you look at a television screen or at a colored newspaper picture through a magnifying glass, you will find that every color is made up of tiny dots of just a few colors. Yet when you look from a normal distance the bits appear to blend together to form the many colors we perceive.

I think this effect is most easy to see in fabrics. Many vibrant fabrics are created by weaving pre-dyed fibers to create the illusion of other colors. In the following example, an orange yarn is created by mixing dark orange and yellow fibers. Here is an image of the unmixed fibers:

Here is the finished batt after being carded a total of four times. You can see that the optically mixed orange is much lighter than the original.

If you look closely you can still see the two uniquely colored fibers.

Term: Positive Shape

The space that is occupied by the shapes that make-up the subject in a work of art. Positive shapes are surrounded by the space in-between objects which is called negative space or background shapes. The positive shapes give meaning and volume to realistic forms of artwork.

Term: Earth Colors

Various pigments consisting mostly of iron oxides and learning toward a brownish hue. Earth colors are made from refined clays and minerals dug from the ground. Typical colors include umber, ochre, and sienna.

These natural pigments are used extensively in landscape painting but are also useful in portraits as skin colors. Some look so much like flesh tones that they can be used without mixing. Earth colors have large particle sizes which makes them more transparent.