5-Week Series: Week 3 - Drawing for Painting
Channel: Angela Bandurka
Date: 2019-06-27

This video was recorded during a live painting demo in my 5-week oil/acrylic painting workshop at Cole Gallery in Edmonds, WA on June 20, 2019.

The key to this week's class was SIMPLIFICATION! Don't do a detailed, shadowed drawing for painting because you're going to paint right over it anyway. Instead, focus on getting the relationships right (the angles and relative sizes of shapes, and where they fall in relation to each other). TAKE YOUR TIME – this was a class demo and I was putting it together quickly, but in the studio work I do take more time to make sure that my relationships are all working well before I proceed.

It's important to understand perspective and to learn to draw if you want to paint anything representational. I encourage my students to practice drawing, even if it's just 20 minutes a week. The more you draw, the better you'll get. It's all about the time put in. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, The Workbook; by Betty Edwards, is a great place to start (you can purchase it on Amazon or at your favourite local bookseller).

Note: this was a photo reference that I took in Florence, Italy in October 2018. It's important to take your own resource photos for your work if you can't paint on location. Even when I do paint plein air, I'll take photos for the studio work that comes later.

I hope this was helpful :)