Tips for Naming Artwork
Here are some helpful tips you can use when naming your artwork for exhibition or sale.
Tip #1: Keep it simple and keep it short. Don’t make your titles lengthy or complicated. Keeping it simple is always best. Make them easy to remember and understand. You’ll get better results that way.
Tip #2: Make your titles descriptive but not too personal. Instead of being ambiguous, consider naming your art something that describes what is going on in the artwork. For example, you just completed a still life painting of some fruit and a candle on a bedside table; you could name it “Still Life with Fruit and Candle.”
In addition, you should not get too personal with your descriptive titles. If your painting is of your sister, it would not be best to name it “My Younger Sister Liz.” No one except a family member would be interested in buying such a painting.
However, if you were to name it “Girl in the Red Dress,” then you have suddenly expanded your audience to more potential buyers.
Tip # 3: Include the name of the place when naming a painting of a particular location, especially if it is of a famous place. People want to know what or where the location is especially if it is a place they are familiar with, such as a familiar mountain range, hometown, or old homestead where they grew up, etc. They will also want to know the name of a place they have visited before or hope to see someday. Be sure to title the painting by location name if it is a famous landmark, national monument, or park. Lastly, if it is not familiar to many, viewers can still be curious enough to want to know the name.
Tip #4: Never name your painting “Untitled.” This can be a real deal stopper and a complete turn-off to a potential customer. Viewers and potential buyers will have difficulty believing your work has value if your piece is called “Untitled.” Titles do matter to an art buyer!
Furthermore, if you are selling online, “Untitled” won’t get you anywhere in the search engines. Try typing the keyword “untitled” in Google, DuckDuckGo, or some other search engine and see what the results are. You’ll have a hard time finding your masterpiece in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). It will be buried so deep your painting will never get found.
Tip #5: For specific genres, like portraits, landscapes, historic events, etc., you might try the following:
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- Portraits — Include the individual’s name, and add the date and occupation.
- Landscapes — Start with the location, maybe include the time of day, the season of the year, and perhaps the mood as well. Example: “The Garden Tomb at Sunset“
- Historic event — Name it by what the event is, such as “First Man on the Moon.”
Tip #6: Start with the artwork’s focal point. This will usually be the most apparent element of the piece. Titling your painting after the focal point will help others understand your artwork better, especially if your piece is abstract.
Tip #7: Get others involved in the naming process. You can ask others for help naming your artwork or get their impressions on a title you are considering. What might sound like a clever title to you could be a total flop. Getting feedback from others will help you choose just the right name for your masterpiece.
Tip #8: For multiple pieces in a series of paintings, you might want to name them sequentially. For instance, if you wanted to do a series of snow paintings, they could be titled “Fence Post in the Snow #1”, “Fence Post in the Snow #2”, “Fence Post in the Snow #3,” etc. You get the idea. Or you can give them all similar names as I did in my Peggy’s Cove series. I simply named these “Peggy’s Cove,” “Return to Peggy’s Cove,” and “Peggy’s Cove Revisited.”
by Teresa Bernard
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Linear perspective is a rendering technique used by fine artists to create the illusion of depth on a flat surface. It is the most basic form of perspective in which parallel lines appear to converge in the distance at a vanishing point on the horizon line. (See illustration to the right.)
Three basic elements must be present in a work of art to make linear perspective possible. These are a horizon line, a vanishing point, and convergence lines. If any one of these elements is missing, the illusion of depth is weak.
Size and placement — Objects appear smaller as they move further away from the viewer towards the horizon line. Larger objects tend to appear closer and smaller ones tend to recede into the background. Also, related elements placed lower to the bottom of the canvas will appear to be closer to the viewer than those placed higher on the canvas.
Overlapping objects — The easiest and fastest way to create depth on a 2-D surface is to overlap objects. Partially covering one object with another gives an appearance of depth. This can be accomplished by allowing the contour of one element to slightly cover the shape of another, so it looks like one item is physically sitting in front of another.
Color — As objects recede or move off into the distance, the intensity of their color becomes less saturated and shifts towards the background color, which is usually a blue-gray middle value. Even bright whites and rich blacks tend toward medium gray and will eventually disappear into the background.
Making a viewfinder requires little effort. There are two types: window and L-shape. Both types are simple to make and which one you choose depends on the canvas you plan to paint on. For standard size canvases, you may want to choose the window viewfinder. Take a simple piece of paper, scrap mat board, or cardboard and cut a rectangular window in the center to look through. The window opening should be proportionate to the prepared canvas in height and width. For example, a 16″ x 20″ or 24″ x 30″ canvas would require the viewfinder window to be 2″ x 2.5″ or 4″ x 5″.
The L-shaped viewfinder is made from two L-shaped pieces of cardboard, mat board, or paper that, when placed together, create a frame around your area of focus. You then look through this frame to determine the scene you wish to paint.
Using the viewfinder is a simple technique that has been around and used by artists for hundreds of years. What a viewfinder does is frame and crop out unimportant areas of an image. These would be the background details that could muddle up a landscape and take away from the overall unity of the artwork, making it a weak composition.
Grid enlarging is the process of using a grid to precisely copy and enlarge a smaller image and transfer it onto a larger canvas. Artists use this technique regularly to enlarge and transfer compositions they desire to paint to a canvas as part of prepping it for painting. This entails drawing a grid on your reference image and then drawing another grid on your canvas of equal or greater proportion. Then, one square at a time, you draw the picture onto your canvas, concentrating on the contents of each square until the image is complete.
Step 3 — Use a pencil and ruler to carefully measure and mark along the outside edge of the photo. Put tick marks at every inch, half-inch, or quarter-inch depending on the size of your reference image and how much detail you need to transfer. Then carefully connect your marks by lightly drawing your grid directly onto the image.
Step 4 — Begin your transfer by drawing everything you see in one block of the reference photograph into the corresponding block on your canvas. Focus only on one square and ignore all the others until the one is completed and it is time to copy the next block to canvas. The reason you should focus on only one block at a time is so that you will end up drawing what is actually there – what your eye sees – rather than what you think should be there.
A good place to start drawing is with the top left square of your canvas. Then work your way across and down the canvas, row-by-row, and column-by-column, until you have completed your detailed drawing. Pay careful attention to make sure you are in the correct square, or your drawing will be off, and you will have to erase some of the drawing and start over from the point where you went off-grid.
When you use this simple technique to compose your oil paintings, you are more likely to create a unified, harmonious, and balanced composition.
The golden ratio can create beauty and balance in the layout and design of all your paintings. Note the point where the diagonal lines intersect. That particular point is key when using this ratio to compose your paintings. You want to place your key elements or focal point at this intersection. As already stated, the golden ratio is infinitely divisible. This means multiple intersections can be identified where sub-elements of a scene can be placed.
Photo reference books for artists are also available for purchase at your local art store, bookstore, or even online. They contain images of landscapes, sky, water, wildlife, and others. These images are all copyright-free as long as you use them according to the terms specified.
Reference photos are simply a collection of images used by visual artists for inspiration and as raw material to create their compositions from. They are handy tools and an excellent resource for artists to work from. When used as resource material, reference images can be of any living or inanimate object, a place or location, an animal, plant life, or an individual. They come in handy when it isn’t feasible for the artist to be there in person and observe the element or subject matter they want to paint or draw.