In my Beginning Painting class at Westminster, students used oils to do traditional still life, photorealism, and abstraction. We also covered the basics of color theory. They did a variety of color theory exercises to help inform their work on their paintings.

shape & value

Since many of my students were not art majors, and some had not taken Beginning Drawing, this was a crash course in observational drawing, and the use of value. This painting was limited to grayscale values, and followed an exercise in which students created a 6-step value scale, from white to black. The still life itself consisted of either all-white or monochromatic objects.

photorealism

While I initially debated the wisdom of throwing beginning painting students into a photorealist assignment, I believed it was possible for them to take on this challenge and succeed. I also wanted students to walk away from this class with something they could be proud of, and I felt like this assignment would provide that. This assignment was inspired by Ralph Goings’ work, and followed a color theory assignment in which students had to match colors on a printed color wheel. The photorealism assignment was essentially an extreme version of this color-matching exercise. Students created their own still life (within defined parameters), and then worked from a photo of that still life, first doing a monochromatic underpainting with raw umber to establish value relationships, and then working to match the colors and values from the original photo.

interpretation

In this assignment, students were invited to interpret a realistic image in a style of abstraction they selected from art history. The first semester I taught this class, I had my students select from a set of master paintings. In subsequent semesters, I had them use their photorealist still life as the basis for their abstraction. The final abstraction could closely resemble the original (in composition, colors, etc.), or it could bear no recognizable relationship to its initial reference point. They simply needed to effectively express the subject in the style they had chosen.