In a recent interview, I was asked, "What's your criticism of most painting teachers?" That one took me aback for a moment, then I heard myself say, "They don't teach students how to practice."
Think about it: The best musicians spend hours behind closed doors, practicing finger exercises, arpeggios, going over selected portions of a piece of music - all sorts of maneuvers that they were taught by
THEIR teachers for honing their craft.
Professional golfers go through routine practice exercises daily to keep what they've obtained already and to find ways to make their game
even better. Many of these behind the scene routines were shown them by their teachers.
Go through the list, whether in the arts or sports or any other performance field: the pros will always tell you that the behind the
scenes practice is paramount to their success.
FOR THE PAINTER, TWO OF HUNDREDS
There are hundreds of practice exercises that can make the best painter a better painter and enable the emerging painter to thrive. Here
are just two:
Fruit and veggies are great subjects for this one. Bell peppers are ideal because the come in several colors. Place the
reference under a single direct light, then observe how the colors/values change in different parts of what's in shadow and what's not in shadow. Find the color mixtures that will give you those variations. Dozens and dozens of these will feed your skills like nothing else.
Find some piece of nature - bark, a rock, sand, leaf, etc - and discover by experimenting from your tube colors, two cools and two
warms with white that will give you the variations you are seeing in that reference.
Betsy Wyeth retrieved from the floor hundreds of Andrew's drawings and studies. These were his practices that served their purpose,
then were no longer important to him It was the experience he needed to create the painting he wanted. Could it be that all those practice pieces were 80% of the reason he reached the heights he did in painting?
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