Realistic Painting Workshop

5PAINTING TECHNIQUES

In chapter 2, we learned about the five basic fractal shapes: oval, blade, shield, amoeba, and composite. Your job as a painter is to match your brushstrokes to the large and small fractal shapes (or visual rhythm) of the object you want to paint. In this chapter, I will take you through a few of the techniques used to create my paintings, many of which we learned in the previous chapters.

We used a random chaos underpainting to create the detail and elements in the example painting (see page 61), hoping that all the accidental combinations will work. Chaos would work. But we discovered that we needed to adjust that chaos further in some parts of the painting. In this chapter, we’ll explore various ways of creating an adjusted ...