In this blog post we will be going through different ideas for paintings to use and how to troubleshoot questions that participants may have. 

In our last blog post, we went through how to know you are choosing a good image and the three things you should make sure you are including when choosing an image. 

Over the years of teaching paint party events, I have seen that landscapes are the easiest paintings to teach. 

This is because they don’t have so much detail and they just use a lot of color mixing and blending skills without the worry of having to make it look like a realistic object. 

Examples of pictures you could do are seascape/beach scenes, autumn/fall trees, field with flowers etc. You can add more or less detail as you’d like. 

Adding in water to your landscape scene will make your painting harder, except for beaches which are easier to teach. 

Adding in clouds, will also add a level of complexity to your painting. 

As you have limited time, you don’t want to be explaining harder areas of a painting but rather give over the joy of painting without the participants getting frustrated. 

My go to is to explain what colors mixed together create what and then show how we can add a complementary color to make the color dull. We can also make a color lighter value with white, but we want to be aware that white makes colors flat and we may need to add another color to make it more alive again. 

I also show how we blend from one color to the next. For example for a blue sky that gets lighter towards the horizon line, we keep on adding white into the blue by just picking up white on our brush and holding our paintbrush perpendicular to the canvas. We need to paint in little strokes and go backwards and forwards, using both sides of the brush. We also need to paint quickly so that the paint doesn’t dry and it blends from one color to another. 

I also explain how we don’t need to overmix on our palette, we want to just mix the basic color, for instance blue and yellow to make green and then we can just pick up yellow on our brush and paint straight onto the canvas. This technique means we are getting all the hues coming through on our canvas, instead of the paint being just a flat one color hue on our palette. 

I also explain how it’s easier to make a lighter color darker, but to make a darker color lighter is much harder. To make sure you have the light areas in, either start off with them first or leave enough space to put them in. 

You also want to make sure you wash your paintbrush well and dry it in between colors, but not between different hues like lighter and darker hues. 

Common obstacles I find when teaching a paint party event: 

• Participants use too much paint and don’t leave enough space for the different hues to show through. For instance, they paint a whole area in a dark green hue, but don’t leave space for the lighter yellow-green and then it’s really hard to see the true hue. 
• Participants use too much paint and then try to paint on top and the whole area becomes a mix of color and it doesn’t look so pretty. When this happens, I tell them to stop and wait for it to dry and then come back. 
• Participants try to fix an area with too much paint and then the nice painting they did before disappears. When this happens, I explain ideally BEFORE this happens, that we never want to go completely over what we have painted, we want to just ADD to it with less paint on our brush. Because it’s a one layer painting, we want to paint the color in and then come with less paint on the brush and add little bits in. 
• Participants want to add another color on top of what they already have painted, but it needs to blend in to the dry paint. In this case, I tell them to put in the paint and then use a dry brush to blend the edge of the paint out and then you don’t need to repaint the whole area and it will look blended. 
• Participants use too little paint and the canvas is showing through and none of the paint is blending. In this case, I explain that they need not be scared of the paint and they should paint with more paint on their brush. I show them how to paint the paint onto their brush from their palette. 

But to preempt these problems, I usually explain these tips as I am illustrating the steps involved in the painting, but as I go around and help the participants I keep reiterating and reminding them of these tips. 

But to make sure your paint party runs smoothly, I would suggest sticking to a painting that doesn’t have to many colors to mix. It can have lighter and darker values which are easy to illustrate how to mix, but too many colors like a sunset with a reflection of water would be quite tricky. Simplify the painting as much as you can without it being too easy, and keep one part a little bit harder so that participants can still be stimulated. 

I hope these tips help and these ideas below give you some great ideas. Some of these images are hard and may need simplifying. 

Remember, though, your job is to show they joy of painting and to do so you need to enjoy painting what you have prepared and then half your job is done!

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions on this series.