Introduction to Painting Glass - Red Wine Still Life
see step photos below
Artist and teacher Sue Pruett provides step by step instructions and photographs that takes the student through the painting process. This electronic lesson includes 15 pages of written text focusing on the basics of painting glass, and step photos how to paint the wine glass. The first five pages focus on the theory concepts of how to paint a transparent object, the next 10 pages are step by step detailed instructions painting the red wine glass.
This lesson is packed with information addressing the important concepts related to painting glass such as transparency, light, and form. Still Life concepts are always reinforced in Sue's materials. Extender medium is used to ease the application of light and dark values, showing the artist how to create soft gradations of color using acrylics.
Sue writes: As an artist I find glass fascinating to study especially setting up my own still life designs and photographing them. What fascinates me the most is how difficult I thought it would be to depict a realistic piece of glass but how easy it is to paint once you understand the concepts. Just like anything else we paint the artist must understand the theory of value, light source, color, intensity, form, and shadows in order to paint glass.
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The depth of the class will be developed from dark to light using values of Black, Grey, Medium White, and Warm White. Since glass is transparent, the darkest value of the glass will be the background value/color. The medium value of the glass will be a mid-value Grey #6; this value will cover the largest area of the shines. As the values get lighter the application will be placed within a smaller area of the previous area applied which I refer to as ‘pyramiding’. That last sentence is one I will keep repeating through this lesson because that is what will give the glass form and makes it look three-dimensional. Value creates form, the more values achieved the greater the form and dimension in the painting.