The Cross-Training Edge: Mastering Many Mediums
If you’ve ever learned a second language, you understand how that ability not only adds richness to your life but actually increases your confidence in and mastery of your first language. It’s the same with painting. Here, artist Michael Chesley Johnson elaborates on the benefits of adding a new medium into your painting repertoire, which can bolster your skills—and increase your enjoyment of—your primary medium.
Cut Loose, Have Fun
You may find a new medium frustrating at first, when it doesn’t handle in the same way as your primary medium. With practice, however, you’ll begin to have fun with it and will enjoy exploring new approaches—some of which you might be able to apply to your first medium. One of my students, who’s primarily an oil painter but also paints in watercolor, has started adding watercolor over his oil paintings, once dry, and to great effect. I don’t know how archival his method is, but I know he’s having fun.
Hello, Versatility
Athletes cross-train because it helps prevent injury, shortens recovery time and increases overall fitness. As a painter, I also cross-train, working equally in pastel and oil and, lately, in gouache. I find that working this way keeps me on top of my game in all areas. Why? If an idea isn’t working in one medium, I may be able to turn to a tool or method from another medium to help. I regularly use an oil painting knife in my pastel practice, for example, because it offers a quick way to scrape off pastel and to make lively marks.
You Deserve a Break
Working in just one medium is like working in just one style: Over time, you risk allowing yourself to become bored. In the same way that it can be freeing for a realistic painter to experiment now and then with wild colors and looser strokes, changing your medium can open up the creative space around you. Consider it a vacation.
Cross-Pollination
I tell my students that one medium informs the other. Because pastel sticks, for example, are manufactured with discrete steps in value, it’s easy to keep a handle on this essential element of representational painting. With oil, however, controlling value can be more difficult; any time you modify a mixture by adding another color, the value shifts. Because my work in pastel has developed my value awareness, I’m able to apply that understanding in my oil sessions. Conversely, although we don’t often think of “mixing color” in pastel when I find it necessary to do so, I’m more successful because of my experience with mixing color in oil.
Play to Your Strengths
They say that a person can’t be a master of all things, and I believe this holds true in terms of art. To reap the benefits of cross-training, you don’t have to give equal attention to all things. If your skills are stronger in one medium, you should play to those strengths but continue to engage with other media. If, over time, you come to prefer one of your new media, don’t be afraid to change your emphasis. You owe no loyalty to your original medium—only respect since it got you to where you are today.
Michael Chesley Johnson Workshops
Pastelist Michael Chesley Johnson (mchesleyjohnson.com) is the author of Outdoor Study to Studio: Take Your Plein Air Painting to the Next Level and other books and is also a painting instructor who’s featured in several Artists Network TV videos (artistsnetwork.com/store). He teaches painting workshops throughout the United States.
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