Getting Started

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

October Impression Oil John Hulsey

This week is the beginning of my winter semester of teaching painting to a new group of adults interested in learning how to start with oils. I only have eight weeks to teach them the fundamentals so that they can begin to get some results on the canvas rather than frustration. It is a daunting challenge for any instructor to figure out how to condense decades of knowledge and practice into a system which can be taught in so short a time. People have gotten used to instant information and gratification and no amount of explaining the 10,000 hour principle can overcome those ingrained expectations. There are so many things to learn: values, color theory and color mixing, edges, surfaces, types of brushes and tools and how to handle them, linear perspective and composition, and on and on. So how to encourage and inspire them in a process that I know will take years to learn? I have a method which I have come to rely on,…