Aldridge | Painter's Quiz

1. List three really good reasons to jump right in to a painting before spending time quietly focused on looking at your subject matter:
a.
b.
c.

2. List the three prime advantages in beginning a painting without a well-understood concept or idea about what excites or interests you most and/or where you want to go with it:
a.
b.
c.

3. Cite the merits of not being able to draw well as would be useful, not practicing and enhancing your drawing skills and/or not taking time to resolve a good drawing including measuring, checking angles and proportions, etc:
a.
b.
c.

4. Note several worthwhile rationales to not paying attention to where the light source is coming from, where it is going (i.e. what it is falling across, what direction the shadows move, etc.), how strong it is—as well as what color temperature the light source is along with color temperature of it’s shadows.
Extra points for not defining midtone, highlight, shadow, cast shadow and reflected light:
a.
b.
c.

5. List three benefits to seeing your subject matter only as laundry-list names of objects rather than as shapes of colors which you observe in the context of their setting:
a.
b.
c.

6. Discuss how you profit from never considering the background until you are at least midway through your painting—better yet, three-forths, nine-tenths of the way! Extra points for supporting the case that the background is irrelevant to the objects and utterly superfluous to your painting as a whole:
a.
b.
c.

7. List three excellent reasons to continually ignore any of the relationships between different elements of the painting such as shapes, forms, edges, handling, lighting, size, space, hues, temperatures, values intensities, etc:
a.
b.
c.

8. Comment on the issue of painting what you think you know as opposed to what you see (ie: every leaf on the distant tree, every eyelash on the person thirty feet away from you, a kindergarten-style hand-print hand for a hand turned at an angle, hiding portions of fingers, flat color on a form well lit from one side and in shadow on the other, etc.):
a.
b.
c.

9. List any other things you know that are useful to not pay attention to and WHY:

* A bit of faceous sense of humor here—playing with some of the "favorite" or most-often-seen problems that students wrestle with, written with the approach that, if these issues are so popular, wide-spread in use and often so-well-held onto, there must be some grand reasons for them.
Hmmmm—can't think of any sound reasons for these habits???

The Quiz is just an opportunitiy to see things a different way!
—Donna Aldridge ;-}

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