Burnt Sienna

Your next two paintings will be made with burnt Sienna. They'll be made in two different ways.

First:
You'll make a painting by simply moving the paint around. You'll put it on, take it off, push it around, whatever you need to do to get your values right. For this you will need some q-tips, paper towel, soft brushes, stiff brushes and anything else you can think of that might help you manipulate the paint.

Here's an example from Mark Tansey illustrating how it should look. See how scrub it looks? He's put the paint on the canvas and then scrubbed it around with a rag to physically thin it and make it lighter. Note that no white paint has been used to make this painting. All of the lighter values that you see are the white of the canvas showing through the paint.

Mark Tansey - Triumph over Mastery
http://pictify.com/673247/cityzenart-mark-tansey-triumph-over-mastery-1986

Second: 
You'll make the first burnt Sienna painting by glazing. For this one you'll thin your paint to make lighter values, instead of getting lighter values by adding white.

To begin with, take out a sturdy piece of paper and make a seven value color string on it. #1 is going to be filled with your lightest value having almost no pigment in it. #7 is going to be your darkest value being paint straight from the tube. I would begin with #7 and work lighter. Don't just thin your paint carelessly, you need to have even intervals between each value.

Take another piece of paper and sketch out the image you plan to paint. You can sketch out the forms to help you understand where things are in the image, but the thing that you're really sketching out is the areas of value. Create edges for those areas and label them with the appropriate number, like a color-by-number.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/ea/51/5d/ea515dd297bb3c807bcde904d7192715.jpg

To make this painting you will again need to sketch it out before hand. This time you need to be sure to use a light pencil because you're going to be thinning the paint and you'll see those pencil marks if they're not extremely light. Sketch it as lightly and as minimally as you possibly can, just to get the shapes outlining each area of value in the right place.

You're not going to begin exactly like you did with the grey scale painting. For this one you'll begin by adding just a little bit of pigment to your acrylic glazing medium, to make it match your #1 value. This is going to be your lightest value so thin it pretty well, so that it just has a little little bit of color, like in the upper area of Tansey's paining. Make sure the mixture is thoroughly integrated and that there are no lumps of paint. Then cover the entire canvas with that value.

Once you've coated the canvas with this lightest value put it aside and let it dry for a while. Go work on the other burnt Sienna painting.

Once that first layer is dry you'll come back and thin some paint again. This time make it match the #2 value. Cover the whole canvas again except for the areas of the lightest value! At this point those areas of #1 value are finished. You'll never paint over them again.

Put the painting aside and let it dry again.

When it's dry come back and do the #3 value remembering not to paint over any of the areas of #1 or #2 value. Keep adding layers and letting it dry until you get through #7 and you're done. At that point the painting might look a little odd and blocky. That's o.k. The important thing is to see how as the layers of paint have built up and how that allows light to penetrate the layers of paint and bounce around within it. If you take the painting in your hand and move it around you can tell that it's a little bit like a thin build up of amber or solidified honey. Just as light moves through amber or honey, it moves through your paint. making it visually feel deeper than it is and as if it even has its own luminescence.

Here's an illustration of what I'm getting at, and where the class is going. Each of those colored bands represents a layer of paint. As the light travels through the medium it hits different particles of pigment from each color. It hits the canvas and bounces back out traveling through the paint again hitting more different particles of pigment. By the time it gets to your eye that light has moved through all of these layers and pigment particles to bring those colors to your eye.

http://www.muralmaster.org/current/2010_cuyahoga_county_juvenil_justice_centre_dome_
mural/021%20oil%20glaze%20diagram%202.jpg

Light traveling through a layer of yellow and a layer of blue comes out as green. This is much different from just laying on a layer of green. The color is deeper and richer. The paint itself can look almost jewel like.

For now, you've just got the burnt Sienna working for you, so you don't get all of these color relationships happening. We will expand into that slowly, so that you can keep on top of what's happening with the colors you're using.