Painting (as a hobby)

Discussion Open Forum
1

Does anyone here do any painting?

How about specifically with acrylics? I’m curious as to what brands of materials you like or dislike, where your favorite art supply shop is if you’re in Taipei, and what techniques you’ve found worked (or didn’t). I toyed with watercolors a couple years ago and I’m just starting to self-teach with acrylics – I am curious as to whether we have any other amateur (or pro!) artists online here. I don’t know whether we have enough here to keep a thread going but I thought it worth a shot. :smiley:

I bought a cheap set of about 20 acrylic colors for starters, for about NT$300 at an art shop near Shida, and some inexpensive canvases, and have started my first painting directly on the canvas without additional priming. I’ll be moving up to more expensive artist-grade paints next, as I’ve found the consistency of these to be quite varied, and the pigment load in the titanium white was very unsatisfactory (poor coverage), but I did want to start cheap to play with the colors and color blending without wasting too much money.

Feel free to post pics of your work here too, good or bad. :stuck_out_tongue:

2

I learned Zen buddhist “one touch” painting while studying in Japan. (You know, monochromatic black ink stuff.) It was cool. I enjoyed it. Did my own wall paper in Taichung a few years ago, but haven’t done anything in 2 or 3 years.

If anyone else is interested, there’s something called a “buddha board”, which lets you “paint” with water on a special surface (about A4 sized). Looks just like the real thing, but evaporates leaving a clean slate a few minutes later. Very zen, and economical.

3

Not my work, but my daughter’s. Old picture too, but she is working with acrylics.

You did the right thing starting out with any old cheap set you could find. Use 'em, see how you like 'em, see how you like painting, and upgrade in the future when you run out of paint.

My girl looooves painting. Often she uses a set of about 20 tubes of watercolors (I have her pick four colors, which I squeeze out for her). She has fun with those, getting the painting really wet so the colors bleed together, but acrylics are bolder and brighter. She also has one of those handy folding watercolor sets that has about six colors and a brush (I looked everywhere in Taiwan and couldn’t find one, so I asked my dad to give her one from the US at Christmas). She’s excited about taking that with her to use in Colorado when we vacation there with the family next month.

Happy painting to you. :slight_smile:

4

Emily had hair cut, she looks so cute. :slight_smile:

I like the colors she used in this picture.
MT maybe you can show us more of your lovely girl’s work in parenting forum.

5

Wow, you let her wear a white shirt while painting acrylics? :laughing: Cute pic, though!

The set I got are YNU (
翼牛
) Brand, and on the tubes they say Shanghai Mantegna; 20 small tubes, only 15 ml each, but for NT$300 that seems ok to me. :idunno:

6

Yes I paint… with a spraygun… painting guitars. Sourcing paint is very interesting in Taiwan since it’s so hard to get professional supplies and equipments in Taiwan and I had to import a lot of things.

I just got this one done…

7

Is that a transparent body on the left?

8

Yes its a transparant swamp ash body, its about to go on ebay…

9

'tis puuurty!

10

[quote=“Jaboney”]I learned Zen buddhist “one touch” painting while studying in Japan. (You know, monochromatic black ink stuff.) It was cool. I enjoyed it. Did my own wall paper in Taichung a few years ago, but haven’t done anything in 2 or 3 years.

If anyone else is interested, there’s something called a “buddha board”, which lets you “paint” with water on a special surface (about A4 sized). Looks just like the real thing, but evaporates leaving a clean slate a few minutes later. Very zen, and economical.[/quote]

Sounds like this stuff:

11

Yeah, like that. Only me and the guy who chipped in sucked. Well… maybe we didn’t stink the place out, but we weren’t about to give up our day jobs.

Whatever. It covered the wall cancer.

I’m making a lightning trip home soon: I should bring back that Buddha Board. Or get over letting others see my fuck-ups.

12

Hey, that’s pretty cool, really! Looks nice.

And who cares about screwing up? I mean, we’re not pros here. I treat this as something fun to do, not something I expect to be good at.

13

I used to paint, with acrylics, and then with oils. I eventually went back to acrylics because of the predictability of the color mixing and fast drying times. Oils are fussy and finicky, if you ask me. I got tired of the high price of those little tubes and eventually started buying little cans of interior latex at the hardware store with huge amounts of base tints in them. This can be runny but you can mix with water and plaster of paris or play sand for interesting effects. I have also done interesting things with white glue and food coloring, corn starch, and other various materials that can hold pigment or make an interesting texture.

For alternatives to canvas, you can try hitting B&Q for pieces of thin plywood, with a fairly smooth “rough” side to it, or you can try painting on the smooth side. If you want to seal or treat the board or canvas, a cheap can of interior white sealant (like the kind used to prep concrete) would do the trick. Avoid shiny surfaces. No need to buy gesso, if you ask me. Once I found a huge bolt of rough heavyweight cotton, with heavy threads and bumps and ripples in it here and there. I stretched it out and had a lot of fun with it.

I really like those watercolor and ink paintings. If I was to go again I would try to do something with those materials on something like rough silk or canvas or burlap or something. Really, there’s a textile for everything.

Painting is fun. Do what you want. Good thread. Cute kid, by the way.

14

Any calligraphy shop will have things similar or identical to those Buddha boards. They use them for letting people test the brushes and they’re cheap as chips.

15

Yeah, since I’m self-teaching, I find oils a bit intimidating, even though I’m the kind of meticulous person who would like to try blending on the canvas to do realistic skin tones and stuff. I’ve always liked the old masters’ portraits and nudes. I hear that style is hard to do with acrylics.

Hey, one can do art with anything!

How much did those oils cost per tube, anyway?

Well, the canvases (pre-stretched and primed) down at the art stores across from Shida are really cheap, only about NT$100, and you can paint over and reuse them too!

Hey, has anyone used Alpha Artist’s acrylics? I’ve never heard of them, but they’re all one of the better stores down at Shida carries. They’re NT$70 for a 50ml tube, and they say they’re professional artist’s colors, “produced with finest quality pigments and renfined Acrylic” (sic), made in Korea. Another tube says they’re ‘made from the finest pigments available in the highest concentrations possible consistent with good handling qualities’.

EDIT: After using them, I can definitively state that Alpha brand SUCKS, and that for $70/tube they’re a ripoff.

The store next to that only carries [b]Winsor & Newton Galeria flow formula /b, which I have a bit more confidence in. It’s not cheap to pick up a full set of 20 or so colors, which is why I ask. I got a few tubes of each and will try them before getting a whole set. I was rather hoping to get some Atelier Artist Quality, Goldens, Matisse, Liquitex, Utrecht Premium Pigment Load, or Windsor & Newton Finity range based on what I was reading online yesterday, but I’ll try what I’ve got first. :idunno:

EDIT: After using them, I can say that Galeria are OK if you’re starting out.

16

i did paint by number once when i was stuck in a hospital,even that looked crap!!

17

if you want to draw realistically, the best advice i ever got was to look at the ‘negative shapes’ in what you are trying to draw or paint. for example, two people standing close to one another. try to get the shape of the space in between their bodies correct- this will help keep things in proportion. you have to fool your eye when you draw. sometimes squinting and seeing things in a fuzzy way can get you to concentrate on the shape and shading. i was always drawing as a kid, but i always had paper and pencil. i never got a feeling for putting color to my work- that’s a whole separate skill. i loved sculpting in clay the best, though. very physical and relaxing.

i had a friend once who wanted to take an art course. i just looked at his handwriting and had an intuition he would be a great artist. one year later i saw him again and his work was incredible not just for his control of proportion, but for the emotion in it. he hadn’t really drawn before then.

18

Did you know that ‘canvas’ comes from ‘cannabis’? :cookie:

19

I paint my toys.
smg.photobucket.com/albums/v714/taiwanpsycho/

20

I do watercolors – see my avatar – always got my stuff from the art store a lane or two up toward Hoping E Road from Grandma Nitti$. …very good shop. I’m sure they could set up you with some good acrylics too if you wanted to ask them.