Duration From 10 minutes to one hour depending on scale
Materials Palette knife, containers with lids for mixing paint (plastic screw top containers are best for acrylics and aluminium foil takeaway dishes are good for oils), primed sheets of A1 paper cut down to several smaller sizes, a range of brushes, rags, a spray gun, a number of tubes of paint, painting medium such as thixotropic gel, thinner.
What will I learn?
You create dynamics within a painting by working quickly, making gestural and painterly strokes. The energy and power set in motion by the marks you make leads the eye to the lines, the advancing and receding colours, and the play of light and dark. Marks should always be made paying special attention to their relationship with the space and the edges of the painting. The aim of this exercise is to explore the range of dynamic and static painterly marks and the energy they can bring to a painting.
1. Choose a number of colours that you want to work with, and mix them in containers large enough to hold a couple of inches of paint so that you can cover large brushes. The paints must have the consistency of double cream, so they can move smoothly across large areas, because the dynamics of marks go hand in hand with the viscosity of the paint. To get the right viscosity, add a painting medium, such as a thixotropic gel, and if you're working in oils, use a thinning agent too (one part paint to 1/4 part medium and 1/4 part thinner, or until the mixes seem fluid enough without being watery). Keep all the paints clean and unmixed, and all the brushes and tools separate – use one for each colour. It is usually best to paint flat to avoid vertical drips – unless you want them. The surface of the paper or canvas needs to be primed to create a smooth surface. You can work on a white or a coloured ground.
2. Using three separate brushes and three separate colours, paint the three tones of the top, face, and side of a cube, with only one stroke for each side. Try again now, making another cube with different-sized strokes. By changing the size of the strokes, it appears that you are changing the cube's perspective.
3. Now create a painting with a more complex arrangement of shapes and strokes in different sizes. You can work from observation, with a subject of your choice, or invent an image.
4. Taking this further, try working with paint of varying thinness or thickness, which will change the dynamic and power of your marks. Paints can be made thicker or more runny by varying the amount of medium or thinner you use. You could also apply thinner with a spraying bottle to melt the paint and create a watery flow, use stencils to create different effects, or use a glazing medium to work with thin transparent layers.
What do the results show?
You should see the different effects you can achieve with just one mark if you experiment with dynamics and viscosity. You have to make careful decisions to keep a balance between flowing, energetic marks and static marks within a whole composition. Clarity of mark is enhanced by keeping all the brushes, colours, and shapes clean and separate, even though they may overlap, or sit side by side, on a painting.