9781422287101

11

Creating Paintings

TECHNIQUES There are far more painting techniques than there are paint types. Each artist can decide to use paint a little differently to get a unique effect in the final painting. If you compare multiple painters’ works, you’ll notice that they can look quite different from each other. You might even be able to guess who painted one piece based on what the artist’s other pieces look like. You can tell the artists apart because of their choices of subject, color, and form, but also because of their individual painting techniques. Some painters take the traditional route, layering on paint and mix- ing it to create new hues and shading. Various amounts of layering and mixing will produce very different styles of painting. Or an artist might decide to just use solid blocks of color, without much mixing. Other painters splatter or drip paint onto their canvases. Jackson Pol- lock’s paintings, for example, involve big splashes of paint flung across the canvas. This is a fairly easy style to reproduce, if you want to try it yourself. A painter may also decide to paint in dots in a style called pointil- lism. Instead of making big brush strokes and blending lines together, the painter can paint small dots one at a time. Up close, the painting just looks like a bunch of dots, but farther away, the dots come together to form a picture. PAINTING STYLES Every painter has his or her own unique technique. However, we can also group painters and other artists into broader themes. Painters often produce works that have some of the same qualities. Many of the artists in one painting style may have similar subjects, or use similar techniques. There are lots of different styles of painting. Some overlap in time, while others were the main style of painting that dominated their era.