What Is Plain Air Painting?

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village.com, I'm Vince Fazio at the Sedona art center, and I'm here to tell you about oil painting, one session paintings. This is a situation for plain air painting. When you do plain air painting you need a portable set up, something like this. Some sort of easel, some sort of materials set up where you can have everything with you. You want to work on a small format because the time, the light is going to change quickly. So consider time of day. You want to be starting in the late afternoon, you want to get some evening light, or you want to start early in the morning. Noon is a bad time, so lunch break is probably not a good time to go plain air painting. The other thing about plain air painting, is as I said before you're going to be working very quickly and you're going to need to use a limited palette, you don't want to use too many colors. You want to generalize what you're seeing in the landscape into the simplest shapes you can. Next I'm going to talk about painting from still life set up, which gives you a lot more control, a lot more options as far as subject matter and personalizing it. So what you're going to want to do there is look at, what do you like to paint, and that's an exploration in itself. Then I'm going to talk about painting from photographs and I'm going to do a sample of that and we'll see how that goes."