Virtual Art Academy® Observation Painting Lessons

You simply keep changing the mix until it matches what you see. You do not need to know anything about color. If you read my artist's statement, you will see how it took me years to fully understand this. It was only after twenty or so years of painting that I began to understand the importance of the topics in this Building Block. Many artists don't even get to this point. Most beginners look for tutorials on how to paint skies, how to paint trees, how to paint clouds, how to paint the sea, how to paint rocks and so on. I used to have a bookshelf full of those books. Now I've finally thrown them away because they all miss the big point.

If you learn how to see shapes, values, colors and edges, you don't need to learn how to paint any of those individual things. Once you've learned how to see shapes, values, colors and edges, you can paint anything, even portraits! - traditionally the hardest thing of all to paint. It's that simple!

The Observation Building Block consists of six course units (in pdf format) and a total of 138 pages:

To help you master this process, before going to full color, you can also go to the intermediate stage of painting a limited value study. This has some real advantages, not just as a learning tool, but also as a means for further exploring and refining your notan composition (I often do this stage when planning a large studio painting). With this study you can explore: light/dark patterns, edges of form and cast shadows, and much more advanced things such as lost and found edges. It is much quicker and easier to explore these aspects of your composition in black and white, rather than going to full color right away. This unit is all about how to observe values, and will give you all the tips and techniques learned over the years.

In this course unit, you will learn:

The other thing you need to know is that there is also a tried and true procedure you need to follow to acquire this skill which you need to follow. There were basically two schools of teaching this color skill in the United States in the mid 20th century. Both of these schools were very successful. One school was run in Massachusetts on the East Coast by Henry Hensche (1899-1992) and the other in Los Angeles by Sergei Bongart (1918-1985). Both of these teachers were responsible for teaching many of today's most respected artists and painting instructors, and each has their own group of enthusiasts for their particular teaching methods. I have experience of both methods because one of my teachers, Ovanes Berberian was a scholarship student with Sergei Bongart, and another of my teachers was Cedric Egeli, one of the top portrait painters in the US, who studied with Henry Hensche.

Just as it has been for centuries in the art world, the best knowledge passes from generation to generation through a relatively small number of artists. I have combined the most useful approaches from both teachers in this course unit to explain to you how to learn this skill. If you go onto the Virtual Art Academy Online Campus, you will find a lot of students who have been learning this on their own without a teacher and they are doing very well. There is actually no need to spend $1000 on a workshop to learn this skill, just a few dollars on materials and some patience of course! is enough.

In this course unit, you will learn:

By the way, the principles of atmospheric perspective do not apply just to landscapes. They apply equally well to still life and portrait paintings.

In this course unit, you will learn:

Yes, these techniques will work very well sometimes, but unfortunately when the actual conditions are a little different, these techniques will only lead you astray. Instead, my approach is to teach you what to look for so that you will be able to paint any atmospheric conditions and weather patterns, and your landscapes will be true to nature. With this approach you will avoid the 'formulaic' and hackneyed look that so much beginner work has and start to produce truly beautiful landscapes that capture the true feeling and emotion of a place in time.

In this course unit, you will learn:

There's a great technique I learned from a friend for how to see this transition. I was painting in Venice many years ago, and making just this same mistake on my canvas when this friend showed me this technique and I immediately saw the problem with my painting. With the problem fixed, I ended up selling the painting for a couple of thousand dollars, so it was some pretty valuable advice!

In this course unit, you will learn:

For example, monterey pines and monterey cypresses are both species of trees that grow on the Monterey coast. However although every monterey pine is a different shape from every other monterey pine, and every monterey cypress tree is a different shape from every other monterey cypress tree, someone who knows their trees can immediately tell which is which.

When I lived on the Monterey coast I was always able to tell which of the many professional artists who painted that coastline actually spent a lot of time there studying the trees. Somehow their paintings were more 'real' and captured the true soul of the landscape, whereas other painters seemed to be painting generic trees from their imaginations.

This means that before you start painting a subject you need to spend a lot of time studying it (that is if you want to truly capture the essence of your subject). You can tell by the tall and compact structure that these are Italian cypress trees. You know from their 'itness' that they are not palm trees or oak trees.

Understanding this concept takes you far beyond the literal observation of nature that we have covered in units one through five, and can take your art to a completely new level once you have developed some mastery in it. Once you have learned to identify and then represent the itness of your subject, you can become far more creative with your compositions.

Rodney Winfield (b. 1925), a good friend and a great artist and teacher taught me this very powerful idea of 'itness', and I have not come across this term anywhere else. Rodney was the artist selected to design the stained glass window in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. and I credit much of my knowledge of artistic abstract design to him.

A large part of this course unit is about learning the itness of trees, one of the most important elements in any landscape. My source for this information is an exceptional book, written by Rex Vicat Cole (1870 to 1940). This book is now difficult to get hold of, except for a version with very poor illustrations, but I have included all of the valuable information for a landscape painter in this course unit.

As an aside you might have noticed that a lot of the most valuable information I have dug up for this course is from sources written over 100 years ago. Although often difficult to read because of the old language and lack of illustrations, these old books contain some of the most valuable information on the principles of art that seems to have been lost in the 20th century. My goal with these courses is to revive and permanently document a lot of that 'lost' knowledge so that artists of the 21st century will have a larger body of knowledge from which to work.

In this course unit, you will learn: