Seeing is an imaginative act

Welcome to the COAS summer term painting course and hello to other blog followers and fellow painting nerds.

We're kicking off with two of the most important ideas in painting the negative image and the figure/ground relationship as demonstrated in these two works by Escher and Alfred Munnings

We'll be painting dogs mostly during the session to see how these mechanisms work in practice. If you get the time during the week have a go at one of these Velazquez dogs or the one by Berthe Morisot.

Play around with 3 values ( eg.black, grey and white) to link your foreground figure and your background context. If you don't have time to paint you can practice this with a charcoal or even biro drawing for your sketchbook.