Episode 5: Mark Mehaffey Vocabulary

Here’s some of the ideas and concepts you’ll hear in my discussion with Mark Mehaffey in Episode 5.

Plein air painting-

Painting a painting outside. Studio painting is where you paint inside.

Blending -

There are two ways to blend acrylic painting. Physical blending is where you take two colors and where they meet, you physically blend them together. For example, if you have a shape of yellow and a shape of blue, you’d use a brush and blend the two where they met and in this case, create a green. This creates a soft edge (see below.) In acrylic this can be tricky because it dries so quickly. Mehaffey also talks about optical blending. You do this by placing small strokes of blue and yellow side by side. The eye will blend those two colors optically.

Values-

Mehaffey uses five values both in his teaching and in his own work. These values are

White - Light - medium (midtone) - medium dark - Very Dark (black)

This is one of the many ways he uses simplification in his work. There are thousands of values in real life, but he takes what he sees and makes it lighter or darker to be one of these five values. To him, that makes a better painting.

Value Studies-

A thumbnail or small sketch artists create as a way to work out the values in a painting before they begin the painting itself.

Simplification -

Unless you’re Chris Krupinski (episode 2), most artists don’t draw every detail. A lot of painting is deciding what to keep in and what to take out. This is simplification and it’s incredibly important.

Edges -

In a painting, shapes have edges. There are three main types. Lost edges, which are more or less nonexistent. They just fade into the background. Soft edges can be feathered so you can see a difference between shapes but it’s subtle. Hard edges are hard, and they are what our eye looks for first. Many artists use their hardest edges in their focal area to draw the eye in.

Principles of design -

Design is a whole conversation on it’s own. Instead of trying to rehash what others have already done quite well, I’m going to send you over to artist John Lovett’s excellent explanation here.

Unity - Check out what Lovett has to say on unity here.

Dominance - Check out what Lovett has to say on dominance here.

High key painting -

A painting that relies mostly on light values.

Low key painting-

A painting that relies mostly on dark values.

Mother color-

A mother color is a color created when you mix all of your colors together. You then mix a bit back in to every color you use in a painting. It creates automatic unity in your colors.

Components of color -

Colors have components or characteristics. They include:

Hue- actual color

Value - how light or dark

Saturation - how bright a color is

Primary colors-

Primary colors are colors you can’t mix. They include red, blue, and yellow.

Secondary mixtures (secondary colors)- These are the colors you can mix by using the primary colors. The secondary colors are green (blue and yellow), orange (red and yellow), and purple (blue and red.)

Colored ground -

Some artists want paint their board or canvas with a color. This is called a colored ground. So for example, sometimes Mehaffey starts with a panel painted white. But other times he'll cover it with cadmium red, let it dry, and then paint on that.