Classroom Activity

Explore the Basics of Painting

Understanding painting is fundamental to any artistic journey. These seven introductory techniques can help students build their painting skills.

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A palette knife is a flexible, dull tool typically used to mix or apply paint. Many artists paint with a palette knife instead of a brush. They can build up paint quickly and create various textured effects, from smooth to rough.

In this technique, the artist uses a dry brush to drag a small amount of paint across a surface. This produces a scratchy effect when applied to a dry surface.

Artists typically use a cloth to wipe away excess paint. When they use a cloth to rub the paint into the surface, however, they create highlights that may attract the viewer’s attention.

Rubbing a sponge over a surface can smooth out paint. Dipping the sponge into paint and then dabbing it onto a surface creates a three-dimensional texture.

Blending is used to fade two or more colors into each other. The effect is gradually mixing one color into another or moving from light to dark or vice versa. 
 

Scratching into a surface to show the layer underneath is called sgraffito. This technique is typically done toward the end of the painting process to reveal a contrasting color or to carve a design.

Applying new paint to paint that has not yet dried makes blending easier. This technique, called wet on wet, also requires the artist to work quickly and finish each layer before it dries completely. The goal is to finish the painting in one session.

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We look slightly down onto a crush of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, wagons, and streetcars enclosed by a row of densely spaced buildings and skyscrapers opposite us in this horizontal painting. The street in front of us is alive with action but the overall color palette is subdued with burgundy red, grays, and black, punctuated by bright spots of harvest yellow, shamrock green, apple red, and white. Most of the people wear long dark coats and black hats but a few in particular draw the eye. For instance, in a patch of sunlight in the lower right corner, three women wearing light blue, scarlet-red, or emerald-green dresses stand out from the crowd. The sunlight also highlights a white spot on the ground, probably snow, amid the crowd to our right. Beyond the band of people in the street close to us, more people fill in the space around carriages, wagons, and trolleys, and a large horse-drawn cart piled with large yellow blocks, perhaps hay, at the center of the composition. A little in the distance to our left, a few bare trees stand around a patch of white ground. Beyond that, in the top half of the painting, city buildings are blocked in with rectangles of muted red, gray, and tan. Shorter buildings, about six to ten stories high, cluster in front of the taller buildings that reach off the top edge of the painting. The band of skyscrapers is broken only by a gray patch of sky visible in a gap between the buildings to our right of center, along the top of the canvas. White smoke rises from a few chimneys and billboards and advertisements are painted onto the fronts of some of the buildings. The paint is loosely applied, so many of the people and objects are created with only a few swipes of the brush, which makes many of the details indistinct. The artist signed the work with pine-green paint near the lower left corner: “Geo Bellows.”

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