Painting Ideas and Techniques

DIY painting the artist's way

On this site, you'll find painting ideas and techniques on both art and interior design. Art is about creating beauty that lasts - just what you need for your interior design.

Here you won’t find fashion colors. Instead, you’ll find painting ideas and techniques, based on the ways of artmaking. Painting knowledge is on one hand about materials and preparations - that's DIY-knowledge. But painting knowledge is also about color, proportions, light, about making creative choices.

Here you'll find some interior painting ideas for your kitchen, bedroom, nursery or bathroom

And in art, a DIY approach is a good thing too...

Knowledge on painting techniques has gone rare, even in art schools. Art painting had a hard time during the 20th century, as it had to comply with science (according to which 'color doesn't really exist'). Old painting knowledge went out of use, and more than once the end of painting was announced. The wind is changing, and of course, older art forms still exist. Beauty is coming back into contemporary art, but where can you learn to create it? My sincere hope is, that the tips and techniques on this website will set you off. Click here if you're ready to pick up your brushes.

The good news is: you don’t have to be a genius.

Painting is just like cooking. You go through some recipes, buy ingredients, prepare them and then you just do it. Besides getting the right recipes and ingredients, the most important is: to be there in the moment, with your attention. To taste, smell and use your imagination.

Do you like cooking? Are you good with clothes, make-up, flowers? Then you’re sure to have some talent for painting as well.
Here are some painting ideas and recipes for:

mixing colors
underpainting examples
color washing
making your own egg tempera or oil paint

Some things can only be learned by experience and, well - failure. One learns the most by making mistakes. I learned a lot. I've put it up here, for you to take advantage of.

Real beauty doesn't go out of style

Good design doesn’t go out of style. It fullfills the basic human need to experience some essence of nature, in a human way. Beauty like that is of all ages.
Well OK, I’m idealistic. But I know it can be done. Painting is a craft like any other. For a while, people believed painting to be the irrational eruption of a genius. But the best abstract painters were those, who had an oldfashioned training in oil painting. The painting ideas and techniques from this craft are the basis of all good design.

And at the same time, there's practicality. Click here for more on:

When you are planning a painting job, you decide on lots of little things concearning colors, materials and techniques. Along with the practical info you need, you’ll find painting ideas on color layering and color schemes, and maybe some computer tools to help you visualize your results, and make a solid plan that's in line with your practical possibilities. That gives you also a beforehand idea about your results, so you can signal difficulties before you bump into them during your painting job.

Artistic elements have a profound logic of their own. Making an interior painting design is a lot like engeneering. And: a good painting job integrates artistic painting ideas with material know-how. When you apply designer laws to your interior painting design, you can create a natural balance, colors that stay beautiful, and a home that reflects something of who you are.
Think outside the box. Rules are great, but you can't base your choices on them. They're like a checklist, or tools to empower you. They shine a light on your choices, but first you make the choices. Color schemes are great, but they need to accomplish your furniture. Pictures of interior design give you ideas, but they don't show you what it's like to live in them, or how colors like that will work in your own room, with your specific daylight.

Living in realms of color

A lot of the painting ideas on this site are actually about color. Color is an energy: both light and matter. In its natural form, it lives and oozes. Colors like that don't come straight out of a paintcan. But even the most chemical colors can be brought back into natural harmony if you know how to use them, for example in color washing techniques. That's a skill - a very refined one - but it can be learned.

Each room can have colors that sustain its function, to make the room not only LOOK, but also FEEL right. Check these out:

The life-sustaining quality of color is especially good for children. The child’s brain develops by the sensory perceptions it receives. Give children good colors and classical music (along with love and good food), and they will develop into intelligent and balanced adults.

Interior design

Esthetic satisfaction is a proces where cleaning, sanding and filling holes go hand in hand with deliberations on color schemes and designing styles. Combining the practical to the artistic is what creates the endresult. Somewhere in the middle of it, you add that little extra - by choosing the right color, picking the right sheen or doing the right preps. You build a look-and-feel, but you do it with your own two hands. But when you have some beforehand knowledge on materials and color effects, you can count them in. Maybe it helps preventing cases like: bumping into unexpected effects while you’re in the middle of a painting job. Or looking at your finished room, and seeing the walls are too dark, or the colors too strong. Or, looking at your woodwork that was done a few years ago, seeing it starting to peel off again. Reading through the pages of this site will help you make the best of it.

Art painting as a quest

The art of painting is a slow art, that needs practicing. You can’t learn to play the piano in one lesson, but I’ll give you my recipes, so you can learn lot faster than I did. But practicing is great really… To practice painting can be a form of relaxation - and, if you want, meditation – on itself. You learn to focus, without putting yourself under stress. To plan your work, yet to act on the moment. When the process of painting is one flow of decision, one stream of quiet awareness, you can hardly go wrong: you’ll automatically hesitate and stop before making the ‘mistake’. It’s all about tasting, smelling, and adjusting things to fit the way you really like it.
Landscape painting

Every genre has it's own basic rules:

In the beginning, you still follow 'rules' to explore the road. But after that, you can find your own way and bend the rules, to support your individual artistic expression.

The trip is about more than just a final destination. There is so much more in the process itself. Making art is one of the few area's in life where you can be really free, and find out about what life means to you, what's really important. Painting gets me into a state where I can feel the natural order, and the intense beauty of things – very ordinary things, on any time, in any place. Artistic painting is an ongoing learning process, it can be scary, thrilling and at times frustrating. But a lot of that can be helped with skills that empower your creativity, taking away the barriers to the creative flow. It's great to surprise yourself, having made something you couldn't imagine before. Click here for:

Art is in 'heart'

If you see art of which you don't see the point: don't meekly conclude that you 'probably don't understand art'. My (maybe idealistic) but serious belief is, that anyone can see if an artwork is good, or not. Some people believe that art should be above life and human feelings, because human life and feelings are vulgar. But I'd rather have lots of mediocre and melodramatic art with real heart in it, than to risk loosing one true artist because he or she thinks she 'doesn't understand art'.

When you're looking for short-term profit: don't go into the arts. Artists give stuff away. Some make money, others don't. It does help, if you can make stuff that other people find beautiful or relevant. But really good art works are not made out of egoism - only if we step over that and give away our best, our work will be good enough. This effort is invisible and takes courage. This is why painters need each other, because we understand each other. That's how we can keep generating that beauty.

Real beauty is forever

An artwork shouldn’t stop to give you satisfaction. Does a Vermeer or a Rembrandt ever start to dissatisfy or bore you? No. It’s beauty is lasting. The same goes for traditional folk and tole design: its very good design. You can have a Norwegian sweater all your life, and it never goes out of style. It’s in line with a certain natural order of things, yet manmade and not to be found in nature. That’s what I call art. And even if you and I don't reach that ideal, it's so worth to cherish it, and just try...

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