Learn to Paint With Acrylics

Peter Cunningham's inaugural ARTBANK workshop is a six-week of Mondays Learn to Paint With Acrylics course, which started on Monday, February 13th.

On the first evening, we students have already dipped our first Riggers and painted branches and dabbed leaves. We were all shown and used the same techniques, yet all of us created different species!

Peter, in his delightful tone and pace of delivery, assures us that next week we will be following his painting of our first full scene. Wow! It sounds so amazing.

Who Am I?

I am a complete idiot with "real" paint. I'm an emerging digital artist. There are no drips, no spills, and no sticky brown spots on the studio floor. Just good clean fun.

My 'brush' is a stylus that controls the direction and pressure of computer-generated brushes.

I pick colours from a user interface that offers millions of hue and tonal variations with a tap; mistakes are deleted with Ctrl (Cmd) Z; layers build like stacked animation cells of old, removing the need to think in logical stages according to how the paint will dry, or how transparent or opaque it might be (I can "back paint" later).

Here's me painting a Spitfire with digital 'acrylic' and a crayon.

Pat Godfrey digitally painting a Spitfire with a sylus

Why am I on the course?

When I collide 'real' paint - the wet stuff - on a palate, my World turns a pooey shade of brown or purple. As I load my brush, the palate is filled with the wrong shades. I go to transport the load to my canvas or paper, and roughly half arrives; with no brakes; an accident skidding in running out of my carefully crafted sketch. Disaster. Every time.

Who is on the course?

I can't but notice that, other than Peter and Jon King (ARTBANK's Curator facilitating Peter's workshop), I'm the only bloke. I'm joined by women; some familiar to me and to ARTBANK, and some less so. I sit next to Úna as I know she's a proper professional design student, and I hope to share her class etiquette. She semi-shares part of the fan heater.

I recognise talent when I see it, and I know there's creative talent around me. I hope I won't show myself up as the idiot I know I am.

But as with any ARTBANK workshop I have attended, I am quickly welcomed and made to feel comfortable. I feel like I can mess up and no one will give me a hard time (maybe some banter, but that should be part of the craic anyway).

Our class of February 2017

Peter Cunningham teaching painting with acrylics at ARTBANK February 2017

What did we do?

I watch my fellow students taking turn with Peter to lay beautiful branches onto their pages.

There's a great mix of talents in the room but each scribes convincing foliage. I remark that each looks different - not in a, "Oh my! What have you done?" way. But in awe at how the same techniques allow individual creativity.

My turn. Rather quickly, too.

And here I am learning to swill some bristles around a saucer of three acrylic splodges to load the Rigger (or Liner) brush, holding it upright and lightly on the paper, and gently twisting it across the stage - er, page, and leaving a reckonable likeness of a tree branch. "I've got wood!" I breathe - hopefully quietly as, on reflection, this is not something one says among ladies.

Peter encourages another branch, and then changes the brush in my hand to a Fan No.6 or No.8 (like I know), and loads a threateningly huge dollop of Ultra Marine (blue) on it, and then dips that in the Cadmium Yellow (Pale)! No! This is where my drippy nightmare always starts, right there in the palate.

I resist closing my eyes as pigments blend and mutate before them. But, other than the Burnt Umber I used to trace my branches, there's not my usual brown fudge soup or pukey purple puddle (anyone remember Rum and Black of the 80's?), but a gorgeous mix of dark to light greens! And greens are good for you, no?

I follow Peter's instruction to lightly dab (and slightly flick, rather like Hermione Granger might do to levitate a feather) the fan brush over my so-far successful branches. I hold my breath.

Leaves! There are leaves on my branches! OK, they're not as lovely or bright as my many new friends have laid onto their own papers, but they are leaves nonetheless and they're not falling in late autumn, but vibrant late spring. And in seconds, too. (This takes me AGES to do digitally, and generally my trees are absorbed into a meaningless haze of out-of-focus scenery as landscapes are well out of my league - or have been before this course?)

My first acrylic painting of branches and leaves

branches and leaves painted with acrylic at ARTBANK

The palate and brushes are handed on to the next waiting student. I see a redundant Rigger/Liner brush and grab it, load it with Burnt Umber, and check out how "pixel-perfect" this painting lark can be. And to my surprise and only delight, it's capable of laying down pixel-sized dots of colour, and pixel-width lines. Wow. I'd best get some new reading glasses - this is going to change my creative life for ever!

How much detail can you do with this stuff? Pixel-perfect is how much. Cool!

pixel-sized dots of acrylic painted at ARTBANK

What did we learn?

This is our first evening with Peter and already I have some control (a "C-word" I seldom use without a following accident) of two brushes and one combination of three pigments. How do you top that?

What else did we do?

Riding on the crest of a wave, and feeling rather proud of my tree parts, I thought the evening had peaked. But Peter then demonstrated crafting a lakeland landscape with a baby trowel (that's a Palate Knife, I now know: not a little monster running about the countryside eating goats off bridges).

Peter dipped the trowel in the palate, loaded up a mix of paint, and then scraped the scenery onto the page in less time than it took to write it.

I recall Painting with Bob Ross from the 90's (check him out on YouTube, if you like), and being amazed at his "knocking out" oil paintings - but I never imagined acrylic to be whipped up to behave in this way. My excitement levels went up a notch. Can, or will we ever do this?

What's happening Week Two?

Peter assures us - and I am trying valiantly to believe him - that next week we are to follow his painting a scene, and that by the end of the evening we'll have a masterpiece to take home with us.

Actually, Peter didn't promise a "masterpiece". He's wonderfully reassuring and encouraging, but also honest. It takes practice to master these techniques, equipments, and "happy little accidents" (Bob Ross).

I'm so pleased I managed to blag a place on this over-subscribed course, and I cannot possibly relay the fabulous experience of learning from a Master, such as Peter Cunningham.

I'm a "detail junky" at heart and "real" paint, especially these sticky acrylics, have so far frustrated my every attempt to play with "real" paintings. They are smudgy, ill-coloured, and so blatantly flat. And here I am feeling (relatively) confident that I am about to actually create something and more, to be able to go on and practice and apply the new skills to my own "real paint" creative output.

I should not speak for all my fellow students, but I for one thoroughly enjoyed our first night together and I cannot wait for next Monday for our second installment.

Was it worth it?

This level of experience far outweighs the measly €10 per evening price. This is beyond great value.

Sure, there's a small shopping list to grab, but it's only a starter pack and entirely necessary anyway if we are to carry on with our new skills in our creative outputs.

For interest, the shopping list is:

* One or two Rigger (or Liner) brushes; size 0 and 4-6.

* A Fan brush (No.6-ish, and possibly a smaller one, too).

* A Filbert brush No.10-ish. (It looks like a bullet-tip).

* A toothbrush.

* Some art paper, a board, or canvas as we choose

* Good quality (bright) paint:

* Burnt Umber

* Ultra Marine

* Titanium White

* Cadmium Yellow (Pale)

* Two water tubs; one for washing, and for diluting