The Virtual Art Academy Building Blocks

The Virtual Art Academy® Reference Library

Overview

Unit Two

The Virtual Art Academy Building Blocks

Barry John Raybould, MA (Cantab)

©2005-2013 Barry John Raybould. All rights reserved. Unless otherwise specified, these electronic materials are for your personal and non-commercial use, and you may not modify, copy, distribute, transmit, display, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell any information obtained from these materials without the written permission from the author.

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Overview

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Table of Contents About this Course Unit ...................................................................................................................3 Organization of the Virtual Art Academy® Program .....................................................................4 Introduction to the Building Blocks................................................................................................ 6 Building Block: Brushwork .......................................................................................................... 11 Building Block: Color ...................................................................................................................11 Building Block: Composition .......................................................................................................12 Building Block: Concept .............................................................................................................. 12 Building Block: Drawing.............................................................................................................. 13 Building Block: Form ................................................................................................................... 13 Building Block: Notan ..................................................................................................................14 Building Block: Observation ........................................................................................................14 Building Block: Process & Materials & Equipment..................................................................... 15 History of the Virtual Art Academy ............................................................................................. 16 Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................19

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ABOUT THIS COURSE UNIT In this course unit The Virtual Art Academy® is a highly structured and comprehensive program.

The concept behind the Virtual Art Academy® program is that you need to build up your skills in nine key areas in order to paint well. Many students are frustrated with their progress, and it is usually because they are lacking skills in one of these nine areas. We call these areas the Virtual Art Academy Building Blocks™. The full program will build your skills in every one of these nine Building Blocks.

This course unit contains an overview of the nine Virtual Art Academy Building Blocks™. In this course unit you will find: ♦ the structure of the four major components of the program: the Reference

Library, the Assignments Library, the Video Library, and the Online Campus. ♦ the contents of the nine Building Blocks. ♦ how the visual music and poetry model relates to the Virtual Art Academy®

curriculum. ♦ a brief history of the creation of the Virtual Art Academy®.

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ORGANIZATION OF THE VIRTUAL ART ACADEMY® PROGRAM THE FOUR COMPONENTS OF THE VIRTUAL ART ACADEMY® PROGRAM

The Virtual Art Academy® Reference Library

WORLDWIDE COMMUNITY THE ONLINE CAMPUS The Virtual Art Academy® Assignment Library

The Virtual Art Academy® Video Library

The Virtual Art Academy® Reference Library

The Virtual Art Academy® Reference Library consists of the course units organized into nine Building Blocks. This is the background reading material you need to read before doing the assignments.

The Virtual Art Academy® Assignment Library

The Virtual Art Academy® Assignment Library is where the real learning actually takes place. Each assignment is designed to build a particular skill that is a necessary part of your foundation for learning how to paint.

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The Virtual Art Academy® Video Library

The Virtual Art Academy® Video Library supplements the Reference Library by providing extra information and explanation. It is based around the lectures that Barry John Raybould gives to his students in his live workshops.

The Virtual Art Academy® Online Campus

The Virtual Art Academy® Online Campus is an online forum where students from all over the world get together in the virtual world to share their assignments, providing both motivation and feedback on the assignments themselves. Students who take an active part in this part of the program learn the fastest.

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Overview

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ORGANIZATION OF THE VIRTUAL ART ACADEMY® PROGRAM (CONTINUED) THE NINE BUILDING BLOCKS

Notes:

♦ Materials & Equipment is a part of the Process Building Block. ♦ Visual Music & Poetry is an overview of all nine Building Blocks.

Building Blocks

Building Blocks (continued)

The Virtual Art Academy® Reference Library comprises the nine Building Blocks shown in the above diagram. Each Building Block is a major skill area that you need to master in order to paint well:

♦ Composition: the key ideas in how to develop

♦ Process: step-by-step procedures for how to cre-

ate a painting. ♦ Drawing: how to draw accurate shapes to repre-

sent nature accurately.

the abstract design of your painting and make your work interesting to look at. ♦ Color: how to develop beautiful color harmony

in your paintings. ♦ Brushwork: how to add a deeper layer of interest

and vitality to your paintings and make them far more interesting for viewers to look at. ♦ Concept: how to give your paintings meaning

♦ Form: how to make things look solid and three-

and touch the emotions of your viewers.

dimensional. ♦ Observation: how to learn to see values and col-

ors accurately – the critical skill you need to make things look real and capture the true feeling of your subject or of a specific place. ♦ Notan: how to create a beautiful foundation of

dark, light, and gray shapes as the basis of your composition.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE BUILDING BLOCKS Brushwork This building block concerns how you apply the paint to your working surface.

If you look closely at a painting with good brushwork you see a small abstract painting that is nothing like the painting when you look at it from a distance.

This is the wonderful thing about good brushwork - one painting becomes dozens or even hundreds, depending on where you look! This is the near music of a painting.

Brushwork is another of those aspects of painting (such as accurate observation of hue changes on forms) that distinguishes the great masters. Exciting brushwork adds interest and vitality to your painting, and is what makes a painting a “painting” and not a photograph.

Color Color is what creates excitement in a painting. This Building Block is concerned with the design aspect of color — how to use it effectively in the abstract design of a painting to create the music in your work.

This course starts by giving you a review of all the basic knowledge you need to know about color, including its attributes of hue, value, and saturation, the key color wheels including the Munsell system, and the basic color harmony strategies for simple analogous and complementary schemes to more advanced schemes such as the double split complementary scheme and the adulterated primary scheme.

Building on this knowledge you will learn more advanced principles used by the master colorists, such as the principle of mouse colors, color vibration and optical mixing, and value compression using constant saturation scales.

I have heard many people say that color is personal and that you need to discover your own feeling for color. There is some truth to this but I am not so sure I believe this entirely. One of my earliest influences was one of the most famous landscape painters in England, John Constable. I like this quote of his: “Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.”

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INTRODUCTION TO THE BUILDING BLOCKS (CONTINUED) Composition Composition is the key to successful painting. Without a strong composition, you can spend an enormous amount of time on crafting an accurate representation of your subject, but you will never end up with a work of art.

It is the composition of a painting that makes it interesting to look at and keeps the viewer’s attention. Composition is a major part of the “music” of a painting.

Sometimes I find a painting in a museum that I can just sit and stare at for half an hour and always find new things to look at and enjoy.

In fact, one of the criteria by which I judge the quality of a painting is how long you can enjoy looking at it. A painting that you can enjoy looking at for a half an hour to me has far more quality than a painting that you can only find interesting for 30 seconds or so. Much of this quality is due to how you deal with focal points and eye movement, two of the key units in this Building Block. Space division plays a big part in eye movement, as does the use of line and contrast.

These topics are also covered in detail in this Building Block.

The second key element in the visual poetry and music model is the “music” of a painting or its abstract design. Although your inspiration for a painting usually (but not always) comes from nature, it is very rare that you find a perfect composition in front of you. To make the painting interesting for your viewer you need to design, or compose, the shapes and colors in front of you in order to create an aesthetic arrangement that communicates the concept of your painting.

This Building Block describes the key principles of composition, including the top level principle of unity and variety, one of the most important principles in composition. You will also learn about the key ideas of space division, contrast, focal areas and eye movement as well as how to use organizational structures to give your paintings unity.

“Composition is a convention founded upon wide principles. If it is not yet demonstrated why certain arrangements of form and color give pleasure and other arrangements give pain, it is not a question for us, but for the scientist. We know that it is so, and therefore, without going into the origin of the pain or pleasure, we must accept the facts as we find them.”

Sir Alfred East, R.A., P.R.B.A., R.E.

“To say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano. That Nature is always right, is an assertion, artistically, as untrue, as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right, to the extent even, that it might also be said that Nature is usually wrong: that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all.”

James McNeill Whistler, “Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock” 1885.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE BUILDING BLOCKS (CONTINUED) Concept In this Building Block I talk about those things that turn a painting into a work of art, and that make the difference between an ordinary painting and a masterpiece. I will introduce you to a whole new way of looking at paintings, and explain why you are learning all the individual skills that are included in each of the other Building Blocks.

When you learn to become aware of the poetry in a painting you will begin to see paintings in a new light. You will also start to understand why certain master paintings in museums are considered a masterpiece. It is this element of poetry in addition to the music of a painting that distinguishes a master painter. When you master the ideas in this course unit, your paintings will start to communicate much more emotion and feeling, and come to life. They will become much more meaningful.

Drawing There are many different techniques for learning drawing – gesture, contour, envelopes, scribble line, mass, and so on. But with all these techniques to choose from, where do you start to learn how to draw? How do you decide which technique to choose? In these drawing course units you will learn all the individual techniques, and will I explain how to put it them together so you will learn how to draw better.

Although I've taken numerous drawing classes in my career over the years, I did not find out about some of the most valuable techniques until much later on. If I had known about some of these techniques earlier, it would have saved me a great deal of frustration! So I've included all these for you in these course units.

This course will teach you a basic drawing procedure that you can use to draw accurate shapes. The emphasis in this course is in getting the proportions correct, in contrast with some other drawing courses that focus initially on expression. I believe that unless you draw the shapes fairly accurately in the first place, no amount of expression will result in good work. On the other hand, if you have a solid foundation of accurate shapes, then you can build expression on top of this foundation and produce truly powerful work.

Form Knowing how to make things look three-dimensional is fundamental to making your painting look real. Course unit 1 includes an important technique called the two-value statement which is used for capturing the basics of form in a few minutes.

Course unit 2 expands on this to include more detailed knowledge about the different planes of the light and shade.

Course unit 3 contains some valuable information which was almost lost to art schools, on the hue changes that occur on a form when light hits it - the secret to beautiful color work.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE BUILDING BLOCKS (CONTINUED) Materials & Choosing the right equipment and materials is important to making your life Equipment easy while painting. Painting is difficult enough without having to struggle with your equipment. Therefore it is a good idea to spend some time to get yourself organized with the right equipment. The effort will pay off in the long run. A lot of the information in this building block is from my personal experience, and tips that I have picked up from many experienced painters over the years.

Tip: buying materials and equipment

Where I am aware of a supplier for a particular item of equipment, or some particular materials, I have put that information in the Glossary. You will see that there is a glossary entry for an item, if you see the word italicized in the text. An italicized word means that there is a corresponding entry in the Glossary.

Notan Why does a certain painting win first place in an art competition? The answer lies a lot in its notan structure. Of all the parts of a painting that enhance its abstract design, the “far music” of a painting, the notan structure is the most important.

I created this painting “Sunset over Sand City” in the industrial district on the Monterey Peninsula in California. This particular painting took first place in a landscape painting competition and won an award in the Carmel Plein Air Art Festival in the same year. This was about two years after I started to paint full time. There was no magic to this – I was just lucky enough to have discovered someone teaching a course in notan the year before, and I applied the principles I had learned to create a solid notan foundation for this painting.

A well organized arrangement of dark and light shapes creates an impression of beauty, regardless of either the colors used or of the subject matter. This is called “notan” from the Japanese word that means “dark light harmony”. Just about every successful master painting has a very strong notan structure. Notan is such a powerful factor in the success of your painting that it is one of the first things you should study.

The process may seem simple, but it takes a lot of practice to do well. In this Building Block I’ve put all of the tips and tricks I’ve learned about this subject over the years since I first learned about it, and I am continuing to learn more each year. Most students have found that studying this Building Blocks pays off very quickly in improving their paintings. That is as true for experienced painters as it is for beginners.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE BUILDING BLOCKS (CONTINUED) Observation This Building Block is all about accurate observation. The realism in your painting comes from accurately depicting in paint what you see in front of you.

You do not need to learn how to paint trees, skies, rocks, water, and so on. You need to learn to see trees, skies, rocks and water. Once you see it, painting is easy. When a student says “I can’t seem to mix the right color,” the problem is rarely in the mixing but nearly always in an inability to see the color. Not only is realism affected by your ability to observe color accurately, but so too is color harmony. The color of sunlight together with the effects of atmospheric perspective and reflected light often (but not always) produce a natural color harmony. If you can observe this harmony accurately, then your painting will have automatic color harmony. The color problems in our paintings are often our left brain taking over and telling us what the color should be as opposed to what we are actually seeing.

Process The Process Building Block covers the step-by-step mechanical procedures of creating a painting. I have put these course units into a separate Building Block because, whereas all the other Building Blocks are mostly independent of the medium you are using, this Building Block is specific to oils, acrylics, or watercolors.

Visual Music In this section of the course I talk about those things that turn a painting into a & Poetry work of art and that make the difference between an ordinary painting and a masterpiece. I will introduce you to a whole new way of looking at paintings, and explain why all of the nine Building Blocks that comprise this program are important to the creation of a true work of art.

In a sense, this discussion is at the highest level of painting and can only be appreciated when you have a feel for each of the nine Building Blocks. However I think if you are an absolute beginner you need to understand these main ideas right away so that you know how to evaluate paintings when you see them in galleries or on the internet. As you progress through the program, this topic will become clearer and clearer.

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