Last night I got a question on brush handling from one of the readers of my book - How do I control the paint to keep it from muddying on the canvas?
There are many different ways, one of the keys is to use a ton of paint. Don't think of it as paint so much as the substance of what you are painting and light trapped in the pigment. Try to do some exercises where you paint something simple just to practice paint handling. Use 3 primaries like I advise in the book for now, but don't mix them on the palette at all - try this: put red, yellow and blue on the brush at once (a 1in hog hair brush - I use cheap brushes and beat them up) and
in one confident and subtle stroke, gently twist, press, and release the mixture you want in the place you want and leave it.
One way to do this is to imagine a printer with ink - a %yellow, %red, and %blue will make any color, just vary as needed - let the parts of the brush with the appropriate color gently touch and mix(use 2 colors if at first 3 is too difficult).
This is an exercise, so just leave the paint where it is - try an apple or pear with strong light and shadow for now. As you continue to apply paint, use enough paint to get the color you want without washing your brush, just maybe wiping the excess off (often I don't even do that - my challenge is to get the 3 colors, white and black on the brush and have enough control to let the mixture create the vibrant color - if it's muddy I didn't use enough paint)
There are a million ways to paint - one way or another you need to paint how you feel - I'm more animal than man when I paint, I need to let go and allow instinct to take over, it's freeing, it's why I do it - others are very controlled - find your place on the spectrum by going to the extremes and coming to your place.
I often put down tons of paint and scrape back revealing broken and blended color, then add on top. Also, I might have so much paint on the brush it's falling off as I go to the canvas, only to then decide I'm just going to use the tiniest fleck from the corner of this massive amount of pigment. Keep the wrist loose and constantly vary the direction of your stroke -
don't think about stroke and form, the color and value will take care of form for now, your stroke is the energy of you and the substance.
Another great exercise is to try to make every mark different. Try not to blend or overlap. Brush one way, then another, straight, curved, slow, quick, edgy, soft, whatever, here thick with a knife, then a scrape, another brush - leave the marks, let one lead to another - so if one mark is up and hard, make the next round and thick, another a knife scrape, then next to it a thick knife - I always think everything in opposition, brush strokes smashing against each other because I like the tension and energy. But each stroke is a piece left alone - don't try to make the paint look like your subject for now, try to make it feel awesome, colorful, full of light and energized.
Building dark to light will help keep your colors cleaner; however, when your working on this kind of paint handling exercise you should work so thick it hardly matters. When you get to the lighter parts, set up your most energetic and important stroke by not crowding it -
you want the striking of the light to clearly be the climactic moment - after you've got your 3 colors on your brush, stick the yellow into the white and give it a twist, then
hit the light like a glare off a windshield - bam! Give it a pull to heighten the sense of direction - then let us see where the light also might just catch the object in one or two places as it moves around, across, or over it.
Remember - this is an exercise in paint handling, the end result might not be a painting as you want it, it might be too thick and extreme, but
you need to discover the potential for the paint to be symbolic instead of descriptive.
After I shared this answer with another reader, I was asked:
Do you mean to have each color on a different part of the brush? Like try to dip the red in one corner and blue on other end? Or just three full, straight on dips into the paint?
Each color on a different part of the brush - try it first with yellow and red only, two-thirds yellow on 1 side of a brush, and a little red on the other. For practice - start painting a line or a circle or something in yellow only - then gently tip a speck of red in, then more as you go and leave the fresh mixture as is - try to get at five variations from yellow through yellow- orange, orange, red-orange and red all in one delicate stroke. Use way more paint then you ever have. You want to watch and see the potential of the paint to speak for itself with color and texture - you want to see yellow and red clearly in the mixture, not just the mixed color.
These 5 keys to Mixing Color will help clarify things if you are working on gaining control over your palette.
