Week 2 Milan Art Institute Mastery Program

Hello again! I just finished my second week of the Milan Art Institute's mastery program, and it was quite challenging.

This week we tackled landscape painting using the radiant underpainting technique.

Essentially, we first laid down really bright colours, then added a dark layer on top, and subtracted back from the dark layer to create the highlights. Once that was dry, we added opaque oil paints and highlights.

I had a hard time with this project because I didn't have specific radiant paints, so I tried to mix really bright colours, but I couldn't quite get them as bright as I wanted. When I put the dark wash over it, it dried almost immediately, and I had a hard time subtracting back. I had to use a lot of solvent, and it just ended up making my shapes really blobby.

I’ve never painted a landscape before because there’s so much to take in and I don't like painting lots of tiny details, so I found this quite challenging to render all the different textures of the plants without spending hours painting specific leaves.

Aside from painting, we also did some drawing exercises, working with the value scale, which involved drawing spheres and pears and practicing shading them. We used the scale tool to draw them in proportion and then shaded them to give them volume. I found these exercises to be helpful and a good break from painting.

With these assignments the instructors gave a time limit of how long it should take.

I'm doing this program for two days a week, and so far, I've been able to keep up with the rate of the program, which is about 15 hours a week.

During the break week (week 5), I plan to work on my painting from week one and implement the feedback I received.

Overall, this week was quite challenging, but I'm excited to continue with the program and see how much I can improve.