Bold Strokes of Color

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Confident use of bold brushstrokes begins with a foundation built on color and value.

By Patti Mollica

Fast, loose, and bold are three words that describe what happens when you approach a painting with confidence. If you feel confident in your method and process, it shows in the resulting painting. The painting is executed relatively fast because you’re working with a value plan. Your brushwork has looseness because you lay down definitive strokes and don’t need to change or rework them. Your colors are fresh because they’re not overmixed. The underlying design is bold enough to support the painting and read well from a distance. 

Many people who attend my art workshops have the impression they’ll be learning to paint fast and furiously. Therefore, I explain early on, almost apologetically, that my approach is better described as mindful. My method is mainly geared to representational painters who want to give up the compulsion to paint all the details—an impulse that holds them back from being more expressive.

A Foundation for Consistency

The question becomes: How do you get the artistic confidence that’s required to produce paintings that look confident? It took me years to hone the essential tools that helped me become a consistently better painter. Consistently is the keyword here. To achieve consistency, it’s important to create a solid foundation on which to build a strong painting.

My method is based on three building blocks that set a solid foundation that enables an artist to paint with confidence.

From Recording to Designing

The first and, in my opinion, the most important building block is understanding and seeing simplified value relationships. Value refers the relative lightness or darkness of a color. I understood the importance of identifying approximately where a color’s value fell on a scale of 1-10, but didn’t exactly understand how this would improve the quality of my paintings.

Understanding how to identify a color’s lightness or darkness is important; however, learning how to group together similar values is equally important in creating a bolder underlying design.

We often have to use artistic license to change the values of what we see to values that work better in a painting. For instance, if I’m painting a middle-tone subject against a middle-tone background, I often push the background to be either lighter or darker so that my subject will stand apart more dramatically. My goal is to make a good painting, not to transcribe exactly what I see. 

The Power of the Value Plan

The second building block is being able to translate values to mixed colors. Every paint color has a value attached to it. For your painting to read properly, attention must be paid to ensure the colors translate to the correct values. For instance, dioxazine purple right out of the tube is a dark value, yellow ochre is a middle value and cadmium lemon yellow is a light value. It’s easy to identify the values of some colors. Other colors, especially the very saturated, vibrant colors appear much lighter than they actually are. 

To see a color’s true value, squint at it with your eyes half-shut. Your eyelashes act as a darkening filter that will block out some light and help you to perceive the lightness or darkness of a color. 

Strokes of Confidence

The third building block is expressive brushwork. I like the look of brushstrokes that are energetic, gestural, and unfussy. This type of brushwork can only be accomplished with strokes that are placed and then left alone. I try to mix the correct value and put down my stroke in the shape that helps define the form. In other words, I try to accomplish as much with every single stroke as possible. I encourage students to put down their color once and make a conscious decision to leave it alone. 

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