Dry Brushing Painting Techniques

Series Summary

Painting is the art of using a pigmented medium to create a picture of reality filtered through the imagination, the senses, emotions, and life experience. Artists the world over have multiplied the uses of painting as a vital mode of human expression, whether recording history, retelling myth and legend, expressing religious fervor, or exploring the unknown. From early history to the present, we have records of men and women making graphic representations of their world, showing their understanding and their curiosity.

So, you know how to paint. But do you really know how to paint? In this free video series, our expert will give you tips on advanced painting techniques, including a few tricks that the average painter won't know about. You'll learn everything from dry brushing and scraping to using pencils with charcoal. There's also video clips with tips on varnishing, masking, imprinting, layering, and tonking! Painters and artists can always be better, so why not listen to some tips and lessons from another experienced painter? Advanced painting techniques are within your grasp!

Video Transcript

"Hello! I'm Matt Cail and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you today how to do advanced painting techniques. The first advanced painting technique we're going to cover today is called dry brushing. Dry brushing is basically when you have an under layer of paint, which is already dry. We're actually going to be putting in very light layers of additional wet paint on top of it, but we're not going to be using any media. The paint you're going to be putting on top is not going to be runny. It's actually going to be quite thick and the color is going to be very concentrated. Here I've taken a round brush with some titanium white. What I'm going to do in here is have a little bit of surf bubbling up over here, a little bit of ocean spray coming up over the side. Basically, with little flecks. Again, nothing big. I start very gently dabbing in here. There's not a lot of mixing that goes on here and the paint is very, very solid. It actually is over the blue, but there's not a whole lot of it. This isn't like one big uniform white blob coming up over here. Keep going on here and try to keep your strokes random. You don't want to get it to where it's like da da da da. Definitely keep a randomness to them. You can't go back over. Flick a little bit, but don't over do this because you don't want to get a blotchy look. You want some of the color to remain very concentrated and in contrast to background with the ocean. Keep doing this until you run out of color, then get more paint, and you can repeat. Just make sure not to over do it. You should always be able to see some blue through this with the ocean spray. Again, it shouldn't be a solid line of white in here. If it solidified, you lose the dry brush effect."