Texture, like form, is everywhere within your painting whether you realize or not. It is your decision to distribute your paint in an ultra-smooth manner or with varied amounts of paint. You may prefer to use various mediums to smooth and eliminate your brushstrokes or others to enhance the viscosity of the paint and the visibility of your brushstrokes; these techniques help the viewer traverse your scene in the way that you intended. Texture can aid in setting the path for the viewer’s eye to follow; it can also be used to quicken or slow the viewer’s eye. You may also choose to use various types of brushes or different shaped palette knives to invoke a response to areas within the painting or the entire painting. You can make a choice to place one texture against another to create a relationship that affects the viewer’s sense of wonder, curiosity, and eye movement as they experience the painting (We’ll explore this concept more in Design Principles – Movement and Rhythm in a future week’s post). Your use of texture may be made intentionally with each brushstroke or as part of your overall plan to capture a scene.
The direction of your strokes, the use of hash marks, scraping away paint instead of applying it, using unusual tools like a credit card instead of a brush to make marks are fun ways to create texture that can make your painting fresh.
Varying the amount and flow of paint will create texture too. Thick paint to convey pregnant rolling storm clouds or well-placed smooth areas to suggest areas of calm will keep the viewer engaged. Using the same texture throughout a painting will likely encourage a viewer to move, not within the painting, but onto someone else’s.
Color and value alone can convey a wild wintery day, but add texture’s energy and you can convey emotion, revealing shimmers that send shivers down the spine. Proper use of texture will help convey your story more effectively.
There’s also the texture of the substrate (surface) we are painting on that should be considered part of your design element.
I’m currently experimenting and enjoying the discovery of painting on a variety of textured surfaces; from rough burlap that’s been primed several times with acrylic gesso to glass-like slick surfaces of oil primed panels and everything in-between. My current go-to panel has a slightly textured surface, almost like the texture of human skin magnified 3 times. It’s two coats of student grade gesso and one coat of professional gesso applied with a zero cell foam roller. The last coat is rolled on super slowly to give the pro gesso (which is very thick) small peaks and valleys. Once dried, a slight sanding is given to the entire board, just enough to knock down the top most peaks of gesso. What I have is a board that acts a lot like rough watercolor paper. The underpainting applied in thin coats gives the painting a shimmer. I then use this texture to apply thicker paint in a dry brush fashion, giving the thicker opaque paint even more of a shimmer effect.
The image below shows a few of the surfaces I’m experimenting on.
The small front panel is a piece of oil primed Belgium Linen for reference.
The middle panel is a gesso primed panel described above. The larger back panel is a sheet of Shizen rough watercolor paper mounted to a board and primed with acrylic gesso.
I encourage everyone, as we learn about design, to be open and flexible about the textured surfaces you paint on. You’ll never know until you try it.
Here are some detailed shots of a recent painting I did in Cedarburg, WI.
The panel is 15” x 24” with the three coats of gesso as a primer.
The slight texture gives an excellent surface for a thin under-thick style of painting. Or as some would say, ‘thick over thin or fat over lean.’
Completed Painting 15” x 24”
Detail showing opaque branch and leaf shapes over a transparent underpainting.
Detail showing reflected light shapes on the water. Pulling a fully loaded brush of opaque paint on top of a darker, thinner, transparently painted underpainting in the direction and movement of the shape yields small sparkles from the pitted surface of the panel.
Spattering:
One technique I enjoy doing, in plein air mostly because it is quite messy, is spattering.
This texturing technique does wonders for loosening yourself up when you find you start nitpicking the bejeebers out of your paintings.
Spatter with both colored paint as well as OMS or even some walnut oil. Like watercolor, these spats create not only a unifying effect but, by using different colors, can create a harmonizing effect as well.
Now, as with any texturing, a little goes a long way. You can easily overdo it. Think of it as salt on your food.
Homework assignment:
Next time you go to a museum or gallery, look at the paintings with a texture filter over your awareness. See the art as a whole, but also be aware of the various textures used to convey different objects and your feelings with regard to these textures. Look at Rembrandt and then look at Van Gogh and compare the two. Look at Sargent and then look at “Resting” by Antonio Mancini. Look at Mancini’s use of edges. The edges define the shapes of things; they also aid in defining the textured surfaces of the item. Look at the way he painted the glass decanter on the right. Super suggestive and made with only a few well-placed strokes of paint.
Resting by Antonio Mancini (1852-1930) Painted circa 1887
Mark-making and textures:
Here are three things to keep in mind when you’re laying down the paint.
1. Use the textures of your tools to evoke emotion and make connections stronger. If your brush, knife, or mark-making is not connecting your shapes or conveying the emotion you are feeling, change them until they do.
2. I think it was Sargent who said the direction of brushstrokes have a slight value shift. Horizontal strokes tend to be lighter in value. Vertical strokes tend to be darker. This is because the light, usually from above, picks up the slight brushstroke texture, the peak, on horizontal strokes, whereas vertical strokes capture less highlights.
3. When painting trunks and branches of trees, don’t always follow the growth of the tree with the direction of your brushstroke. Lay some perpendicular strokes down across the tree trunk to slow the eye’s movement downward.