Painting Tips For Any Painting Medium

"Come on Gumble, how can painting tips be useful for any painting medium?"

"This blog post sounds like a bunch of hooey."

Pastel is pastel. Oil is oil. Acrylic is acrylic. They are all totally different, right?

Well, yes, you could say that, if you are only referring to the physical properties of each painting medium.

But, think about this for a second.

What do you do with any of these painting mediums?

Do you paint houses with them? Do you apply them as makeup?

I know artists can be a little weird sometimes, so I could be wrong here.

But, I'm guessing you probably don't use your expensive oil paints to decorate your living room.

What you do with pastels and oils and acrylics and watercolors is create pictures.

Like Zhaoming Wu did in this oil landscape.

And I did in the pastel painting I'll show you in just a moment.

The painting tips I refer to in the title of this blog post are the same creative painting ideas and tips used in any piece of art.

Painted in any medium.

For instance, in Zhaoming's work above he places the star front and center in the foreground.

And even though the tree is painted fairly simply, he puts more detail in it than in the background shapes.

He invite's you to assume the simple background shapes are bushes of some kind.

Rather than boulders.

These simple techniques are great landscape painting tips for beginners.

And part of the core art skills every aspiring artist needs to develop.

And they are also part of the painting tips visible in my pastel painting below.

The only difference is that in my Teahouse art, I used the same ideas Zhaoming did…

But in reverse.

I'll explain in just a second.

Before I do that let me first set the stage.

The inspiration for this picture came from visiting the Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon some years ago.

And no I didn't sneak in during the night.

As a challenge I decided to create a night scene from my daytime photographs.

And it took using my really dark pastels.

So the painting tips you can glean from this picture are much like the creative painting ideas Zhaoming used in his oil art.

Zhaoming put the most detail in his star, the tree.

I've done the same thing. I put the most detail in the windows of the tea house.

I just took it a little further.

I also used warm colors in the windows to contrast with the overall cool tone of the painting.

To help the windows grab your attention.

Everything else in the painting is simplified and less detailed. Sometimes only a hint of what it actually is.

That triggers your imagination to fill in what I don't show. 

So tell me really; aren't these painting tips the very same things you could do in any art?

Best Wishes,
Gary Gumble
Founder of BeginningArtist.com
Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. (George Bernard Shaw)

P.S. I just wanted to remind you.

You can schedule a free 20-minute Art Mentoring call with me via Skype.

So we can talk about these types of things.

Or whatever help you might feel you need in your art.

You never get answers or insights if you never speak up.

Have no fear. I am very well trained and have never bitten anyone.

So schedule a time on my calendar for this free 20-minute Art Mentoring call by clicking here.