Painting Techniques Tips

My favorite example is when I tried painting clouds over the mountain in this painting, "Catalina Sunrise". The original pictures of the sunrise over the Catalina Mountains in Tucson, AZ, were actually a panoramic video.

From the video, I took the first, middle and last frames and stitched them together to give me one picture, which if I had painted it in entirety, would have been 10 feet long, and the mountains would have been very small.

Because I wanted to get all three mountain ranges in, I compressed the view of the Catalina's. It is approximately what you would see if you looked at them from a different angle than what I had.

I also added water in the foreground so I could have more of the beautiful sky colors reflected in the bottom of the painting.

You might ask where the water came from since most of our rivers are mostly dry. Well, if you go north of the water treatment center along the Santa Cruz River, you will find water, and even wildlife.

My mind would just not accept the fact that the brightest part of the clouds was on the bottom. My left brain kept telling it wasn't logical.

After two days of painting...and re-painting...and re-painting...I finally quit for the day and closed the door to my studio.

The next morning I woke up with a brilliant idea. Turn the painting upside down. I did that and had the clouds painted in 5 minutes. Amazing, my creative right brain was uncluttered by the logic of the left and I could instantly do what I wanted.

To see some cloud paintings that I did not have trouble with, go to http://blog.filarecki.com

Speaking of Clouds, I am now making available free cloud photos which I have taken that I am giving you permission to use as reference photos for your paintings. Take advantage of this free offer.

So many times we struggle with what colors will give us the vibrant look that we're looking for. The secret to keeping them from being dull is to never use any color that has the third primary color in it.

For example, suppose you are painting some flowers that are just the most vibrant blue-violet you have ever seen. The complementary color to blue-violet is yellow-orange. The blue-violet is made up of red and blue as their two primary colors. The yellow-orange is made up of red and yellow as its primary colors. Yellow, as the third primary color in the mix will result in dulling down your blue violet.

Of course you want to take advantage of this in areas where you want to make the areas darker. Using the yellow/orange will enable you to create deep and shallow shadows which will give the flowers shape.

Keeping in mind that the third primary color will always dull the mixture of the two other primary colors, you can use this to your advantage no matter what colors you are using.

For more information on color mixing go to my website at www.filarecki.com/mixing-colors

If you are not familiar with masking fluid, or frisket. it is the very thing you need for keeping watercolors from going into areas where you do not want that color or colors to go. It is applied over areas that you have specifically planned to be white or other colors that needs to stay clean.

A perfect example is painting a sailboat. If you cover the entire area of the sailboat with frisket, you are able to paint the sky and water right over the boat and the paint will never penetrate the frisket.

Once the paper is dry, you just rub off the masking liquid and you have nice clean paper to paint or not paint as you want.

If you are on a tight budget, you can use rubber cement. It works as well as the frisket and is significantly less expensive.

You can read much more regarding watercolors techniques including how I got the special effect in the background of the Hummingbird card at How to Paint with Watercolors

I'd like to invite you to visit my website filarecki.com to get more painting tips. I work in acrylics, oils, pastels and watercolors so I have a large variety of paintings.

Also, be sure to take advantage of my free offer to review a painting. I will be giving you tips on how to solve a specific problem you are having in a painting you are working on.

I have only recently taken to the time to start developing this site into a major training tool for viewers like you, so check it out.

Please be patient, though, since it is a work in progress. I promise to continue to expand it so there will be a lot of great information for you to learn from.

I have written some Ezine Articles and HubPage Articles that may be of interest to you.

For a picturesque profile about my work Click Here