If you’re a painter, there are countless things that will influence what your creations will look like when they’re finished.  Things like your palette, techniques, tools, supports, brushes, mediums, additives, etc, all have definite influence on your work. Beyond the material, there are your skills and talents, and this is what we’re going to deal with here. Keep in mind that these skills and talents are intangibles, and they can’t be bought, though they can be acquired, or even learned at a price. Your abilities come from within you, and are developed through determination and time and self-understanding.

More influential than whether you use Liquitex, Golden, or Old Holland paints is the way you handle shape, perspective and light source. These are things that can be taught you in school, but the way you handle them is up to you, how you handle them is where they become skills. Unless you’re a realist or photo-realist painter, you’re going to be breaking rules to some degree when you begin to develop your image.

Shape incorporates all things architectural, natural or anatomical. When you see a straight line, do you need to paint it as a straight line? Does a hand have to have 4 fingers and a thumb? Must both hands have the same?

Perspective determines how things diminish over distance, but must it be that way? Is there a law with the nature of foreshortening that says things must continue to look real? Foreshortening gives perspective a very broad playing field.

Light sources create highlights and shadows, and while we can have multiple light sources in an image, with each influencing the others – must we be bound by things fixed? Can we juxtapose the laws of light on two objects standing next to each other, each having different light sources that don’t influence each other in the least bit? Can you let your shadows be cast in different directions?

How far you allow yourself to play with Shapes, Perspectives, and Light Sources will most definitely determine what “genre” art you are creating. Follow the rules to a “T,” and you are most certainly a realist of some sort. Abandon those rules to the farthest extremes, and you are portraying a world in the abstract. A bit less than abstract, and you’re likely a surreallist. Bend the rules of shape, perspective and light to any degree, less or more, and you will always find yourself somewhere between the real and the abstract. Its all up to you how you choose to see things – follow your bliss with these three cornerstones of vision and you’ll find yourself, and what you are.

 ‘Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.’
Pablo Picasso