Essential Elements of Painting

Have you always wanted to paint but haven’t known where to start? Designed for complete beginners this course will give you a solid and practical foundation in painting using acrylics and oil paints. Kevin McKay will lead you step-by-step through the basic techniques, showing you how to prepare a ground, compose a painting with correct proportion and perspective, and how to build tonal relationships that brings surprising 3-dimensional illusion to your works.

You will learn how to paint directly from life with still-life settings in the studio. Kevin shows you how to structure the composition of a painting, and reference the techniques used by traditional and modern masters. He introduces you to the magical world of colour theory with simple processes for colour mixing, to produce a suite of finished paintings; all the time furthering your skills and building your confidence as a painter.

Course Schedule:
The following is an indicative course schedule only. The content and pace of the sessions may vary in response to the students in the program.

Week 1: Learn a range of measuring methods to help you compose a composition accurately and in the correct proportion.

Week 2: Prepare a tonal ground. Learn to mix an astonishing range of tones and apply these in a transcription of a painting.

Week 3: Develop a still life painting leveraging the sketching and palette mixing skills learnt in weeks 1 and 2.

Week 4: Unlock the magic of vanishing points to draw and paint convincing architectural forms using linear perspective.

Week 5: Light and Shadow. Discover two kinds of light and shadow and the blending skills necessary to paint a sphere under directional light.

Week 6: Colour mixing. Use warm and cool primaries to mix strong secondary colours and mix opposites to make subtle tertiaries. Learn a three-step colour mixing process and apply to a transcription of a bold work by a contemporary master.

Week 7: Harness shifting and blended colours to transcribe a work of a modern or contemporary master that using a full colour palette.

Week 8: Build your understanding of tonal painting as foundation for colour. Learn how to colourise a tonal “underpainting” with glazes, washes, “scumbling” and impasto applications to generate nuanced colours, and variations in mark making.

Please note: There will be no class 14 June due to the King's Birthday Long Weekend

* NAS Short Courses are open to students of ages 16 years and over. The NAS Art Club is open to students between 15 - 17 years of age. 

*Drawing and painting short courses may be held in upstairs studios. If access to stairs is not suitable, please contact us at short.courses@nas.edu.au 

* What to bring? Please refer to the list of required materials in the Art Materials field below. 

Students must supply their own art materials, please refer to the list below.

For Week 1 of the course, students should only bring basic materials as listed below. Kevin will discuss more specific needs with everyone on the first night. Experienced students may bring along their paints and an assortment of brushes and tools.

Basic materials:

• A4 Visual Diary
• HB - 4B pencil
• Rubber eraser
• A3 pad of canvas paper
• White acrylic gesso
• Raw umber acrylic paint
• A range of bristle brushes

Kevin McKay was born in the USA and migrated to Australia with his family at age two. An alumnus of the National Art School and the Southern Sydney Art School, McKay is a suburban landscape painter who composes his work in the studio and en plein air. Plein air studies greatly inform McKay’s practice, with paintings that typically depict eerily empty architectural spaces, where the stillness of classical form and the drama of light is found in the everyday and in the midst of urban transience.

McKay has exhibited extensively around Australia, including holding 15 solo exhibitions since 2010. He was the winner in the Bayside Art Award’s Visual Art Prize in 2018, the Alan Gamble Memorial Award for the Built Environment in 2015, and Waverley Art Prize’s Oil Painting Prize in 2013. He was also the recipient of the inaugural William Fletcher Travelling Fellowship and Rome Residency winner in 2011. Alongside his many awards and prizes, McKay was also the recipient of the Broken Hill Art Exchange residency program in 2019, the inaugural William Fletcher Foundation’s Scholarship to The British School at Rome in 2011, and the Basil & Muriel Hooper Scholarship from the AGNSW in 2006.

Kevin’s work is represented in several public and private collections, including, the Elliott Eyes Collection, Waverley Library, BHP, Kogarah Municipal Council, Toohey’s Brewery, Sydney Institute of TAFE and the State Library of NSW.