Set your brushes aside and discover your potential palette-ability! Using only palette knives and your fingers (which produces quite a different result than a brush) we will explore techniques that can be applied to anything from painting abstract landscapes to detailed portraiture. The benefits of painting with a palette knife include the possibility of creating a rich impasto surface and a crisp-edged, dreamlike quality to work that cannot be achieved with a brush. With a focus on the abstract, we will push and pull color around in large sweeping strokes and small staccato movements on the canvas. We will mix paint, marble and blend with chalk pastels and acrylics and experiment with scraping, sgraffito, and surface altering techniques.
You will work on a substrate of your choosing and will be guided in experimenting with different substrates to understand the different ways the palette knife relates and responds to the surfaces. Techniques and instruction for palette knife painting on paper, plaster, canvas, and wood will all be explored in depth. Painting with a palette knife pushes an artist to loosen up, focus on shapes and colors and let the colors and values placed on the canvas tell the story.
Kit Fee: $10
Supply List:
- 3-5 Palette knives in a variety of shapes and tips. I prefer wood handled, metal ones life here (labeled as painting knives) dickblick.com/products/loew-cornell-steel-painting-knives
- 5 substrates of your choice. Watercolor paper, wood, artist boards, plastered panels, etc. Any and all will work and I encourage you to bring more than one type to work on.
- Your favorite HEAVY BODIED acrylic paints including titanium white, raw umber and black.
- Gel medium of your choice and brush to apply it
- 1-2 small, fine tipped artist brushes (just in case)
- various imagery - NON-INKJET – I recommend a few 11 x 17 cheap black and white copies of photos, especially enlarged images that fill the page
- water container
- rags
- scissors
Optional:
- Heat gun or hair dryer
- Wipes
