Welcome to the Yellow, Red, and Blue Art Course. Part of our Building Essentials series of art courses.
In this series, we focus on color. Not just on color, but learning the important skills you need as an artist to mix color properly. We use only the primary colors of Yellow, Red, and Blue. Magic White™ and Ivory Black complete the family of colors.
Each painting in this series is designed to break the painting process down into easy, step-by-step instructions so that you can be successful with your very first painting. We start with baby steps and build from there. Each painting in the Building Essentials series and every lesson in this course will give you the skills and confidence to succeed as a painter. To become a great artist, you need to learn the basic skills of the Alexander method of wet-on-wet oil painting. Going through this course will teach you what you need to know to be successful in the wet-on-wet painting method. Bill Alexander was one of the greatest teachers who ever lived because he made the complex process of painting simple and easy to understand. His teaching process is easy to follow especially since we’ve made the process even better by breaking each painting into a series of easy to follow lessons.
Each painting in this series comes with an outline of the objectives of each painting and the techniques you will learn. We have also included a grid for each painting so you can resize them for any size canvas. In fact, we would recommend you start with a smaller canvas rather than attempting to recreate Bill’s painting on his larger surface. We would recommend you start with a 8″ X 10″ canvas and work up from there. These paintings also look great on less expensive canvas paper. Feel free to tackle these paintings on a larger canvas if you want. The paintings in this series begin at the introductory level and progress to the intermediate level in terms of difficulty.
We would suggest you complete each painting in order. We begin painting #1 (Terra Incognita). Progress through the series as outlined below in the various modules. Even though you will be using only a few colors, you will create beautiful paintings you will be proud to hang on your living room wall or give as gifts to friends and family.
Feel free to post questions to our exclusive Facebook group (The Alexander Art Club group on Facebook). We monitor the group regularly and will respond to questions from students. Welcome to the program and let’s get started!
NOTE: We use the term “sGraffito” often in this series. Here is a definition:
- A form of decoration made by scratching through a surface to reveal a lower layer of a contrasting color, typically done in plaster or stucco on walls, or in slip on ceramics before firing
- In this series, it is using the palette knife to “scratch” into the paint to create trees and tree branches (among other uses)