DOMINIQUE MILLAR - Artist
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    • Current / Upcoming Courses >
      • Sketching with Pen and Ink
      • Pastels for Beginners and Intermediate
      • Portrait Drawing: Beginners to Advanced
      • The Elements of Drawing for Beginners
      • Oil Painting for Beginners
      • Drawing the Figure from Life - Beginner to Intermediate
      • The Art of Competition: From the High Renaissance to the Baroque
      • Drawing the Animal Kingdom - One Day Workshop
    • Previous Courses >
      • 2017 >
        • The Principles of Life Drawing from the Masters
        • Sustained Life Drawing with Red, Black and White Chalk on Buff and Blue Coloured Paper
        • Painting the Nude - the limited palette approach
        • Portraiture and the Passions
        • Fundamentals of Drawing
        • Fundamentals of Drawing for Beginners at The Makery
        • Principles of Beginners Life Drawing Workshop
        • Artistic Anatomy for Beginners: In the Footsteps of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo
        • The Principles of Drawing for Beginners – from Basic Geometric Shapes to Living Forms
        • The Union of Art History and Practice: the Renaissance and the "Rebirth" of Art
      • 2018 >
        • The Creative Conventions of Portraiture
        • Fundamentals of Drawing Weekend Workshop
        • Landscape Drawing Lessons from the Masters Weekend Workshop
        • The Principles of Drawing for Beginners: Basic Geometric Shapes to Living Forms
        • Fundamentals of Drawing
        • Drawing the Nude - 1 Day Intensive Sustained Pose
  • Short poses
  • Studies
  • Portraits
  • Istoria
  • My Collection
  • Contact

Painting the Nude - the limited palette approach

Dominique Millar, Oil Study of Male Nude, painting course sydney

Since classical antiquity artists have been praised for their ability to reproduce flesh tones with the use of very few pigments. Pliny the Elder stated in his Natural History that ‘four colours only – white from Melos, Attic yellow, red from Sinope on the Black Sea, and the black called ‘atramentum’ – were used’ by the most famous ancient Greek painters. Pliny asserted further - counter intuitively to our age of mass technology! - ‘we must believe that when the painters equipment was less, the results were in every respect better... [for we are now more alive] to the worth of the material and not to the genius of the artist.’
                
Artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Joshua Reynolds took the words of Pliny to heart, producing exquisite flesh tones of pearly greys with luminous scumbles, employing as little as three to five colours. In a similar vein, over an extensive eight week pose, this course aims to introduce students to painting from the life model using a limited palette of no more than four to five colours. No painting experience is necessary, just a desire to begin the process of mastering flesh tones using a limited palette. Some prior life drawing experience is highly recommended.
 

Course Outline
 
  • One to two classes accurately drawing the figure onto a primed canvas using either charcoal, white chalk or the brush.
  • Learn how to arrange the palette and mix up nine tints of flesh colour from light to dark with a palette knife.
  • Lay in a transparent shadow colour using only brown or a mixture of black and red.
  • Direct or indirect ‘dead colour’ approach - either employ all four/five colours immediately or start with a monochromatic palette. Students who choose an indirect approach, will exclude either red or yellow, introducing these colours during the later layers of the picture. Either way, the initial layers will function as ‘cool’ values and the later as ‘warm’. Note: The indirect approach allows the student an easier initial focus on tonal values but requires greater discrimination when deciding how much of the initial layers to leave, cover, thinly scumble or glaze in the later layers. The student may decide to creatively exaggerate warm and cool values at this point, relying less on the observed model, in preference for aesthetic effect.
  • Begin laying in three broad planes of colour, tonally representative of a front plane and two sides planes for all the major forms of the figure. Add further planes of colour until the student has created a sense of modelled form throughout the figure study.
 

Materials required:
 
Purchase one of each of the following colours
 
  • White – Cremnitz white, Titanium white
  • Black – Mars black, vine black, charcoal black
  • Brown – Burnt Umber, Raw Umber
  • Yellow – Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Yellow
  • Red – Cadmium Red, Burnt Siena, Venetian Red, Indian Red, Alizarin Crimson
 
  • A minimum of six to eight medium sized brushes and three "000" brushes. 
  • Palette and palette knife
  • Small bottle of odorlous solvent, medium size bottle of linseed oil.
  • Oil primed canvas preferably with a first dry pale grey layer of colour consisting of mostly white but also black and some yellow and red.
Note: You may wish to buy some liquin and add it with solvent and oil to ensure this layer is dry well in advance of the class.

  • Soap and soap container for washing brushes.
  • Paper towels and linen rags, for wiping brushes and cleaning palette. 

When:
Thursday 4 May - 29 June 2017

Where:
WEA Sydney
72 Bathurst Street 


Student feedback:  

'Dominique is a knowledgeable and patient teacher. Able to break down and explain steps easily. I felt I could take away what I learned and practice at home. Looking forward to more classes in future.'

  • Home
  • About
  • Teaching
    • Current / Upcoming Courses >
      • Sketching with Pen and Ink
      • Pastels for Beginners and Intermediate
      • Portrait Drawing: Beginners to Advanced
      • The Elements of Drawing for Beginners
      • Oil Painting for Beginners
      • Drawing the Figure from Life - Beginner to Intermediate
      • The Art of Competition: From the High Renaissance to the Baroque
      • Drawing the Animal Kingdom - One Day Workshop
    • Previous Courses >
      • 2017 >
        • The Principles of Life Drawing from the Masters
        • Sustained Life Drawing with Red, Black and White Chalk on Buff and Blue Coloured Paper
        • Painting the Nude - the limited palette approach
        • Portraiture and the Passions
        • Fundamentals of Drawing
        • Fundamentals of Drawing for Beginners at The Makery
        • Principles of Beginners Life Drawing Workshop
        • Artistic Anatomy for Beginners: In the Footsteps of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo
        • The Principles of Drawing for Beginners – from Basic Geometric Shapes to Living Forms
        • The Union of Art History and Practice: the Renaissance and the "Rebirth" of Art
      • 2018 >
        • The Creative Conventions of Portraiture
        • Fundamentals of Drawing Weekend Workshop
        • Landscape Drawing Lessons from the Masters Weekend Workshop
        • The Principles of Drawing for Beginners: Basic Geometric Shapes to Living Forms
        • Fundamentals of Drawing
        • Drawing the Nude - 1 Day Intensive Sustained Pose
  • Short poses
  • Studies
  • Portraits
  • Istoria
  • My Collection
  • Contact
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