Online Courses
So What’s it Like?
When you go to a good art school, two things are expected of you: the first is that you will sufficiently develop your skills as a painter so that you will be able to translate your ideas into paint. The second is that you will begin to grow as an artist with a unique point of view, one whose ideas are influenced by their own life experiences and interests. Painting Polytechnic believes that through their paintings, each painter gives us a different vantage point from which to understand our world a little better.
PP painting program is broken down into two main components; Craft and Ideas. The Craft segment is for those with proficient beginner to intermediate levels of painting experience. Craft consists of three modules and develops your skill as a painter, as it teaches you the fundamentals of color, composition and the myriad ways to apply paint.
The Ideas segment is more advanced and for the intermediate to master level painting student. Especially for those who want to build a portfolio for admittance to a college art program. When you have achieved “fluency” in your painting, the next logical step is to start developing your unique voice. Anyone with sufficient painting skills can replicate a scene, but what does it mean to you and the viewer? What do you want to convey? Your ideas can be quite grand or very modest. There is no right or wrong answer? When you discover your motivation for making a particular painting, and are able to develop your idea in a satisfying way, you are a changed and maturing artist.
Let’s go!
Craft: The best way to become a good painter is to paint a lot. So, let’s get started.
When you think about it, there are only three characteristics to consider when creating a painting on a flat surface. They are the shapes of the applied paint, its color and its texture. With just those three considerations, you can create anything from a highly realistic Rembrandt styled painting to the vastly different abstractly styled paintings by Rothko. As you progress through the course, you learn to control each of those characteristics through several fun exercises, all the while creating many small paintings. Through quick exercises, you begin developing your skills as a painter working on color theory, mark-making (paint applicaton) and composition. Each lesson builds upon what was learned previously. After each lesson, you will have accomplished a small painting that you will be proud of and can use as a reference.
Ideas: When a painting moves you, it is rarely just because of the painter’s skill.
While that certainly helps, there is always a special quality in good art that is alluring. You have a reaction. That is what separates great art from the rest. The painter put something of themselves into the work that no other artist could have done. This is the hardest thing to learn and the most difficult to teach, and in fact, most online programs don’t teach it at all. Painting Polytechnic teaches you to develop, understand, and yes, even question your Ideas. Each lesson inspires new and unexpected ways of learning and provides examples that make you think, and make you feel differently about your own work. It is challenging, but oh so rewarding, when you begin to discover what motivates you to make art and how your ideas become manifest into beautiful paintings.
