When you're teaching yourself how to paint, it can be tricky to know how to improve your skills further. Painting studies are useful to guide you on to how to improve your paintings, but how do you know what to start with? Here are a few ideas for studies to help you improve, as well as tips and tricks to help you come up with your own!
Colour-On-Colour Exercises
Getting colour subtleties right can be difficult without practice. By painting an object against a background of the same colour, you can practice varying tones and hues slightly. It helps to pay attention to the colour values and tonal values; sometimes things look like they're slightly lighter or darker when in reality, they're simply a slightly different hue. Try this exercise with varying objects of different colours, such as black, white, and a selection of other colours.
Here’s a white on white and black on black study I created a while ago.
Studies to Improve Weaker Subjects of Painting
If you want to paint in a certain style, but you know you're lacking in a specific area of what you want to achieve, it can be helpful to focus on creating studies purely for that area. Before I started painting, I knew I wanted to create psychological portraits, so I started out with plain portraits to help me get off my feet. Determine what kind of paintings you want to create, and what your weaknesses are, and use that knowledge to your advantage! You don't even have to just create studies for this; I've recently been creating more nature-based paintings and incorporating flowers, man-made geometrical objects, and some landscapes into my regular style of paintings (which are all quite a weakness of mine) so I can improve as I'm creating work I love!
A section of a nature-based painting that I incorporated into my normal style of painting.
Create Paintings with more or less layers than you would normally use.
Only ever do alla prima paintings? Give glazing a go. Or if you usually need 3-5 layers to complete a piece, try only one or two layers! It's important to vary up your painting method to ensure that your process is the most enjoyable for you!
A painting with 4 layers as opposed to my normal 2 or 3 layers!
Create Paintings with a limited number of brushstrokes
This is a bit of a tricky one; take a simple object, and set a limit for the number of brushstrokes to use. This makes it easy to pay careful attention to where you're applying paint and will improve the blocking in stage of your painting. Try doing several studies of the one object with different amounts of brush strokes -I find it easiest to start with higher amounts of brushstrokes and reduce the amount with each proceeding painting.
Use a limited number of brushstrokes to help aid you in the “blocking in” stage of painting.
Use a limited palette
Try using various limited palettes (palettes with only a few colours) to create paintings; you could try the Zorn palette for portraits, the basic primary colours, or even a cyan-magenta-yellow palette! Limited palettes can help to achieve colour harmony, and if you use one already, why not try another?
A Zorn palette I painted a while ago, showing all of the colours you can create with just red, yellow, black and white!
Paint the same object over different coloured grounds
Different coloured bases can completely change a painting as well as the approach to painting. Try painting the same object over several different grounds; lighter, darker, and different colours, perhaps?
You can experiment with crazy colour bases even, such as blue and yellow!
Studies can help to improve our basic skills beyond what we can do with our normal painting routines, so it's important to set aside time to try something new now and again! Which painting study will you be trying first? Comment below!