Famous Artists School Certificate Course in Oil & Watercolor Painting
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Enroll in the Certificate Course in Oil & Watercolor Painting
The Famous Artists School Certificate Course in Oil and Watercolor Painting includes a three-volume, fully illustrated, colorful textbook, a Study Guide with Home Projects and 10 Lesson Assignments for submission to Famous Artists School; 10 Personal Lesson Critiques from your Famous Artists School Instructor; and the useful booklet How to turn your part-time painting into dollars.
Your Certificate Course includes these ten lessons (click on the link to read the details):
The degree of wedge point you put on your pencil controls the width of your line. To make a thin line, simply turn your pencil. You use your sandpaper to sharpen your pencil and to make your wedge point.
1. Getting started
2. Using color and painting in oils
3. First steps in watercolor
4. Moving ahead with watercolor
5. The art of composition
6. Creating the illusion of solid form
7. The beauty of still life
8. Creating moods with color
9. Painting a landscape
10. Applying what you’ve learned
If you wish, you can pay for this course with our convenient Installment Plan.
You can also order the FAS Art Kit, which contains the art supplies you need for completing your Assignments.
Certicate Course in Oil & Watercolor Painting—the Details
Lesson One – Getting Started
Before you start painting, you will want to know how the great artists of yesterday and today achieved their effects. This beginning section of the Coruse brings you a brief history of art, from cave drawings to contemporary art, with dozens of illustrations. It covers ancient and medieval art, the Renaissance, the realism of the 17th century, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract Art, Surrealism, Dada, Futurism—and the contributions of each. You’ll see how contemporary painting has been influenced by these movements. You’ll practice using your tools—paints, various brushes, painting knives. For your Assignment, you’ll begin working with colors, learning to mix and adjust the hue, value, and intensity.
Lesson Two – Using Color and Painting in Oils
You can use color to achieve dramatically different effects in your paintings. In this lesson you’ll study the principles of color: warm and cool colors; achieving light and dark effects with color; how one color affects another and creates different moods; choosing your palette and mixing different pigments; and selecting a color theme. You’ll learn how color is used in landscapes, still life, and portraits. In this lesson, you’ll also be introduced to oil painting techniques, including use of different brushes for different effects and use of the palette knife. You’ll follow the basic steps in painting: toning the canvas, laying in colors, pulling the picture together, and adding the finishing details. For your Assignment, you’ll paint a landscape from a photograph, applying what you’ve learned about selecting and using color, controlling values, and using your paint and tools to make a picture.
Lesson Three – First Steps in Watercolor
Watercolor is an excellent medium for capturing the spontaneous moods of nature. Exploring its many possibilities will be a series of rich and rewarding experiences for you. The reproductions in the text will show you that watercolor can be handled in many ways, all of which are different, personal, and valid. You’ll begin by becoming familiar with some of the basic physical properties of watercolor; choosing the correct paper and brushes; and mixing and controlling colors. You’ll learn “tricks of the trade” for controlling watercolor and achieving special effects. For your Assignment, you’ll produce four small exercises demonstrating matching values, graded wash, wet-in-wet technique, and dry brush technique. You’ll also create a full color painting using these various techniques.
Lesson Four – Moving Ahead with Watercolor
Step-by-step demonstrations thoroughly explain and clarify a number of different approaches to painting in watercolor. You’ll see how to paint water and sky effectively, using the special qualities of watercolor to achieve exciting effects, and you’ll go through the process of creating a complete painting. Next, our Guiding Faculty will show you how they create their paintings in watercolor, detail by detail. You’ll watch as they begin painting large areas, skillfully manipulating the wetness of the brush and pigment. And you’ll learn some of the secrets that make their paintings come alive. For your Assignment, you’ll make a watercolor painting of a scene we provide. Your instructor will be looking to see how well you handle the brushes and paint to interpret the subject, how well you control values, and how you mix and relate colors.
Lesson Five – The Art of Composition
Successful paintings don’t just happen—there is something more to creating a successful picture than just good drawing and paint handling. This “something more” is planning. You need to learn to think about the effect you wish to create before you start painting. This Lesson focuses on shapes and values; you’ll learn how to choose the elements for your painting and arrange them most effectively. You’re shown the four main elements of composition: area, depth, line, and value, and how to use them. Other sections feature how to overlap objects and crop pictures, and use line to get interest into a picture. Guiding Faculty members discuss “design in depth”, and you’ll study four variations on a single composition theme. For your Assignment, you’ll submit four composition drawings, using your own still-life subjects. Your instructor will evaluate your work on how successful you were in selecting objects that go together well in a painting, the arrangement of the elements, and your use of values.
Lesson Six – Creating the Illusion of Solid Form
You can give living, breathing reality to your paintings by developing a sense of form. Here you will discover how to draw objects that look three-dimensional and real. This Lesson shows you that every object has a basic form (cylinder, cone, cube, or sphere), and teaches you how to draw them and how to combine them to create good pictures. You’ll study the use of light and shade in drawing and how to get the proper proportions. Learning to use one-point and two-point perspective will help you create the illusion of form in space. For your Assignment, you’ll make a still life painting from a photo we supply, one of the best ways to develop a good understanding of solid form. With a still life subject your model never moves and your lighting can stay unchanged for as long as you need it. Your instructor will be looking for how well you’ve created the forms of the objects in your picture, as well as the impression of depth and space and a variety of textures and edges.
Lesson Seven – the Beauty of Still Life
Still life by FAS student Christina Cooper.
Still life offers you the opportunity to use all your knowledge of composition to create a grouping which reflects your mood and the interest you feel in the objects and their relationship to each other. A carefully planned still life can evoke feelings about beauty and life, and can forge an intimate connection between the artist and the viewer. This Lesson takes you step-by-step through composing and lighting a still life, and finally to painting the picture itself. For your Assignment, you’ll begin by making a number of arrangements of three or four objects of your choice. You’ll also be asked to include an appropriate portion of the room’s interior with the setup. As you make your arrangement, you’ll want to ask yourself a number of important questions, including: “Is there enough variety in size and shape?” Are the textures varied and interesting? Is the composition unified? Should I eliminate some objects?” Once you are satisfied with your still life, you’ll complete your painting. Your instructor will be chiefly concerned with the arrangement of your still life in the picture space, and how well you have used values, textures, and color to add interest and atmosphere to the painting.
Lesson Eight – Creating Moods with Color
Colors have a strong effect on emotions. They can create almost any kind of mood. When choosing a “palette” or range of colors to use in a painting, you’ll want to first consider what it is that you want to say. Is it a quiet feeling that you want to express, or rather an exciting or even jarring impression? Whatever your intent, the colors you choose will do most of the work of conveying your message. And it is the relationship among the colors on your canvas that is most important: it must be harmonious and well-ordered. It is up to you to control the colors in your painting, whether you are painting from nature or using imaginative hues. This Lesson concentrates on the moods created by colors, and how as an artist you can learn to manage their proportion and harmony. For your Assignment, you’ll make two paintings in color of any subjects you choose, in whatever medium and style you wish. The two paintings should express different moods. In his evaluation, your Instructor will concentrate on how effectively your color choices evoke specific moods or feelings, and how well you have used color proportion and created color harmony.
Lesson Nine – Painting a Landscape
Nature has always been one of the artist’s most inspiring teachers. Here you will learn how to draw on nature for inspiration. You discover how to “see” mountains, rivers, and trees with the eye of an artist. As you venture deeper into this wonderful world, you’ll see how to select and organize a view, how to paint morning scenes, night scenes, clouds, and water, and how to get atmosphere into your painting. Demonstrations by our Guiding Faculty show landscape painting in four different styles: realistic, abstract, cubist, and expressionist. In contrast with still life, you’ll make adjustments to your composition not in the physical elements themselves, but on your paper or canvas. For your Assignment, you’ll submit two landscape paintings of subjects of your own choice. You can look in your own environment for inspiration, remembering that landscapes need not be limited to pastoral, mountain, or seaside scenes. Your Instructor’s evaluation will be based on how well you have used composition to create an interesting, well-organized painting, and how well you have controlled your values, color, and medium.
Lesson Ten – Applying What You’ve Learned
At the end of the ten lessons of your Certificate Course, you’ll review the principles you’ve worked on in the earlier lessons: composition, form, paint handling, the creation of textures, and color. To all these elements, you’ll add the secret ingredient: your own personal approach or way of “seeing” your subject, whatever it may be. After reviewing the demonstrations in the textbook Lessons, along with the comments your Instructor made on your first nine Assignments, you’re ready to create this “graduation” painting. For this Assignment, you will make a full-color painting, in whatever medium you choose, of an original landscape, a landscape based on a photograph, or another subject of special interest to you. Your Instructor will comment on your success in handling all the components you have studied, and give you pointers so that you can continue to progress in your art studies.
ENROLL IN THE CERTIFICATE COURSE IN PAINTING
If you already know that you want to pursue your painting course to the advanced level, then the Famous Artists School Master Course in Painting would be a more suitable and cost-effective choice.
