C-c-c-color!

March 16, 2019August 31, 2020 ~ jcaritas ~ 5 Comments

We’re still at the stage where all of our paintings for class have been in shades of grey: grey oven mitts, grey boxes, the beginning stages of grey horse heads (more on that to come). It makes sense — people perceive value before color, and mastering that in greyscale is much simpler and less distracting — but man, is it boring. Until now, I’ve been faithful to the method, figuring that painting one more grey oven mitt was just like Ralph Macchio waxing Mr. Miyagi’s car, but when I sat down to paint on Saturday and remembered I had run out of Portland Grey Medium, temptation got the better of me. I had recently been to a neighborhood estate sale, and had bought a big case of oils for $5 (to give you a better sense of the quality of these paints, they were mixed in with a bunch of Bob Ross acrylics), so figured what the hey, why not?

Good Lord but this was tough. There’s a reason, I’m learning, that people start out with less precise objects like apples and pears: Unless your apple is turquoise and shaped like a banana, it’s almost difficult to make an apple look unnatural — there’s so much acceptable variation. Not so with a machine-made, perfectly symmetrical brass ladybug sculpture with legs poking out every which way: You might not have ever seen one before, but you know what it’s supposed to look like. I drew and wiped off three times before I measured my way to a shape that was even remotely reminiscent of my model.

As I’ve noted, I’ve been reading Carole Marine’s fabulous “Daily Painting,” and one thing she mentions is that she mixes almost all of her paint from three colors: Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Yellow Light, and Ultramarine Blue. This seemed like an easier way to go than trying to get a sense of the dozen or so paints in my new box, and I didn’t have any other instructions to follow. Instead of simply adding black to a color to make it darker, she typically “greys” the colors she wants to recede, adding different combinations of the three basic colors to make them less saturated. So in this case, since my brass was primarily yellowish, I used mostly Cadmium Yellow Light with a speck of the other two colors for the brightest yellow, and then darkened them further with more red and blue as necessary. My darkest tones are really more of a dark olive green. But — I’m a rookie and this is a rookie painting, so why would you listen to me? Go experiment!

My biggest issue, once again, was light. Not only did the light on my model change throughout my session — making it look entirely different — but I had a bright florescent clamp light pointed directly on my canvas the whole time I was painting. To me, the colors I was using looked vibrant and alive, until I took away the light and…

Well, you see. (Or maybe you can’t — it’s over to the right….a little higher….)

I’m finding as I’m painting on my own that I’m breaking every rule we’re being taught at the school. Fat over lean? Bah! Carefully painting patches of color rather than shapes? Well, that one I should do — but I haven’t been. Shapes all the way. It’s been one thing to follow the correct procedure when I’m painting oven mitts and boxes, but a whole lot more difficult when painting something as complicated as this bug turned out to be. Besides, Carole Marine says she paints her backgrounds last, choosing her order based on the saturation of the colors, so perhaps there are other “correct” procedures as well…. So much to learn!

Things I did well:

I think I did a decent job capturing the way light fell on each object
My bug has decent (though not perfect) proportions and looks three- dimensional (though I do see that the line down the center is off and the right front leg is too wide)
Put a bit more thought into the composition so everything isn’t simply centered
My little pinch pot has a decent texture and shape and was painted fairly quickly

Things I could improve

Too dark!
Background was once again an afterthought — basically thrown together from my leftover paint. Should start thinking about using different brushstrokes and hues to make backgrounds more interesting

Still life #2 – Progress and questions

March 15, 2019March 15, 2019 ~ jcaritas ~ 1 Comment

It was true that my first still life was a bit schizophrenic in its lighting and had some weird boob pimples, but it really wasn’t terrible. I’d certainly done a worse job on plenty of other things I’d attempted. And I’d enjoyed painting something that my copier couldn’t do a better job with. So once again, I decided to give myself a challenge.

One good thing about being old is that I have TONS of stuff. Not expensive stuff, but small, interesting, highly-paintable things I’ve collected throughout the years — especially natural objects that I found in the woods or on the beach (though this shell was clearly bought somewhere — who finds shells like this?). I thought each of these two objects would be a challenging way to try texture, and would together provide an interesting contrast while sharing a beachy theme that made them cohesive (though I’m not worried about composition at this point).

My painting was done at a different angle, since I don’t have a standing easel.

Now I wish I’d worried about composition. Blech. But there are some things here that I actually kind of like. I did a bang-up job with the top of my shell, and that was HARD. And I love the left side of my driftwood — I added a lot of interesting, blocky shading there that really shows the depth. But I can see the exact place where I started to get bored and lazy: pretty much in the exact center of the log. Everything to the right of that point is complete Amateurville Horror.

I’m struggling a bit — and this will be a question for Jim in my next class — with how much I’m supposed to draw. Of course I mapped out my largest shapes: the exterior of the driftwood and shell. And I did draw ovals for the largest indentations in the driftwood, and stripes for the spirals of the shell. But on the right side of the driftwood I mapped out next to nothing, in large part because the light when I did my initial drawing made most of the indentations look shallow and it didn’t seem worth it. As the sun came up, they looked…entirely different, but it seemed too late to map anything out, I was bored and lazy, and I winged it. And it shows.

I also had no idea what to do with the background, which was an old wooden table, as you see in the photo above. Should I attempt to replicate any of the grain, which in real life is so prominent? In the end, I just wanted to get it done — and, since I’d made the rookie mistake of not putting out enough paint, and what I had left of my mixed stuff was getting really thick and gummy — I just painted it pretty monochromatically. It was an afterthought — and again, it shows.

What I did well:
Left side of the driftwood, which — to me — seems to have a spark of that unfussy, effortless(looking) blocky style that I love in modern painting
The shell, while flawed, looks like…a shiny shell

What I could’ve improved:
The composition — yawners
Right side of the driftwood is lacking value and looks flat and unconvincing
In real life, the shell is poking out slightly from the driftwood. That doesn’t come through in my painting — instead it just looks squat. I’m not sure what went wrong here — maybe the placement or value of the shadows? Again, that changed throughout my session, throwing me off.
Background looks like an afterthought and entire subject appears to be floating in space.

And she’s off! Rogue painting #2

March 12, 2019March 12, 2019 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

Now that I knew how to shade, I figured the world was my oyster (and hey, the world was just a ball — and now I could paint that! ). So despite Jim’s admonitions for having gotten ahead of myself with my last rogue painting, I thought I’d dive in and try a still life. After all, I now had all the tools (including this handy-dandy Proportional Divider – how do I love thee!). Also, I’d been reading the highly motivational “Daily Painting,” by Carole Marine, and was inspired to try to fit painting into my life, well, daily.

Luckily, it was a Saturday, and Olive had a friend over, which meant she was entertained and I was free to have a marathon paint session. (Carole Marine talks about finishing small still lifes [lives?] within 1-3 hours, but I’m a very slow painter at this point.) As you may be realizing, I have a tendency to want to rush ahead (and that’s a GOOD thing), so I didn’t want to paint no stupid apple. Instead, I chose something a bit more challenging, but with very little color, so I wouldn’t be distracted (and wouldn’t be wanting what I just…couldn’t… have):

Was he the reason my hydrangeas wouldn’t grow?

Until a couple of years ago, we lived in a house with a garden, and I was always digging in there and finding the coolest things: a marble foo dog; ancient farming equipment; two super-creepy iron sculptures which have nothing to do with this post but which I just have to show anyway; and the aforementioned slightly less cool…high school art project?…that I decided to use as my model.

Until this point, all of my paintings had been copied from another painting — working with a grid and very systematically plotting each point. I wasn’t even changing the scale or the positioning: The original paintings were the exact size we’d be painting them — we just created our paintings in the same corner of the canvas where they’d appeared on their clipboards, and taped off any overhang. When I’d sat down to paint a still life, I hadn’t thought about how big a leap it would be from our class assignments. After all, I knew how to shade now, and I already knew how to tone my canvas, and how to draw out my subject matter (and how to hold my paintbrush!). How hard could it be?

Turns out, very. Working without the grid, I found myself relying very heavily on my proportional divider. This is a tool that looks like an off-center X — on one side is a small pincer that you hold in front of your object to determine the length of a line or the width of a segment; on the other, a larger version of the same that opens or closes to show how that width would scale up or down, depending on your settings. It allows you to more easily scale up an item and still keep everything proportional, and is a godsend for those of us whose brains don’t work that way. But it’s slow to measure every little thing (as I’m always wont to do) and not always accurate, as a tiny miscalculation of the width on the small side can be a huge shift in width on the large side.

The other thing I found difficult was the lighting in my “studio.” Since I live in a small condo, my “studio” is really just a section of my living room. In attempting to make my painting more “daily,” I’ve carved out a period really — insanely — early in the morning, before anyone else is up and before I need to start work. This means I’m usually painting when it’s dark outside.

I wish I had a dedicated space in which to paint, but I can’t see it happening until, say, my daughter moves off to college (and unfortunately she’s not the next Doogie Houser). I’m loving learning to paint, but I’m not committed enough to, say, install florescent lighting in my beautiful public space.

Instead, I’ve been trying to make do, and my efforts have either been too minimal (where I can’t see my canvas or subject very well, and end up with little halos around everything) or too much (where I have a florescent bulb perched on a bookcase over my shoulder, making everything shadowy). I can’t seem to get it right.

This first still-life shows my struggle. Since it was a Saturday, I was able to start in the afternoon, and the body shows that. But look at that weird dark face! By the time I got to that area, the sun had gone down, I had turned on my florescent, and the entire thing was in shadow, with my florescent spotlight dramatically illuminating the eye sockets and upturned nose. That would be fine it was consistent throughout the entire composition, but it’s completely out of place.

Likewise, I need to train myself to get up and take a break when I start to just. want. to. be. DONE. I’d reached that point before putting in any of the details in the stomach region, and it shows. Instead of the swirls of plaster, I’d basically just thrown in a mix of lighter and darker brush strokes, which looks cloudy rather than solid and scratchy.

Things I did well:

Top arm/shoulder shading and top boob
Crack in plaster around neck (though the larger crack/hole is a bit much)
Shadows under the body
Proportions are reasonably accurate

Things I could improve:

Bottom boob looks like she has a skin disease
Lighting on face
Texture does not look rough enough (especially on stomach)
Composition: Just plopped there, centered and floating in space.

Finally getting real! Shading and blurring

March 11, 2019August 31, 2020 ~ jcaritas ~ 1 Comment

At this point, I was already beginning to get a bit bored of our subject matter. It was bad enough that we were being forced to go back to the time before God invented color, but did we need to go back to when the world was flat as well? Especially because the assignment during the next class was to paint Dopey’s cousin, Pointy Dopey:

Sigh.

Luckily for us, however, before long we would finally be given the keys to the castle: shading!

box-model — Will I sound silly if I tell you just how excited I was for this assignment?

First Jim gave us a demonstration. Apparently there was more to it than simply smearing your paint together.

two-lines — *Careful, don’t cut yourself!*

To soften an edge (for example, the edge of, say, a box) you first create your adjoining areas of color. (At this point, Jim began a story of his sister going to a sock hop — he must be older than I thought! — and his mother creating a dress for her out of two adjoining areas of fabric.)

Then you use a smaller brush to paint lines connecting the two areas. These could be one of the two colors or an intermediary color. (In the story — you guessed it — the lines were the thread.)

Finally, you take a large, clean, flat brush and brush over the two lines, wiping off your brush after each stroke. (I’m not sure how this fit into the story — it might’ve broken down a bit at that point.)

Then you go back and add sharpness where needed — and back and forth, back and forth until you’re satisfied.

The difficult part of this assignment, though, was not the blurring (although that was harder than I expected once I tried it) — it was those dang angles! It seemed like every time I’d fiddle with the background shading, I’d shave off a bit of an angle here and there until the entire thing began to look quite Seussian. I’d been very careful in the drawing stage to use my brush as an “angle machine,” so it was pretty frustrating to see all that work go down the poop chute — plus I now needed to create them anew sans grid!

The finished product:

boxes-fin — *Could you please move those boxes out of my wa—What!? They’re paint?*

Why do we paint like we do?

March 9, 2019August 31, 2020 ~ jcaritas ~ 6 Comments

In the few weeks I’ve been painting, I’ve realized how little I know about even its most basic tenets. I didn’t know — and now do — how to tone a canvas, how to clean and preserve my brushes, even how to hold a paintbrush. Now I was learning what I thought I knew as a four-year-old: how to put down paint.

After completing our drawings of Dopey and the Oven Mitt, it was time to fill them in. Prior to my rogue gun-jumping first painting, I would’ve thought that this process was easy-peasy — just like Paint by Numbers, right? Not, apparently, so fast.

As I’m learning, one of the keys to painting accurately is separating what you see from what you think you know. You think you know that the ocean is blue; if you don’t consciously work to erase that preconception, you’ll ignore the evidence before you and choose colors much less varied and interesting than what nature has presented. Likewise, you think your fingers are long and tapered, but from many angles they’re foreshortened and squat: Paint them as you think they are, and you’ll look like a cartoon.

It’s difficult work, erasing these preconceived notions. To do it, we need to rely on tricks that divorce our lines — which have no particular meaning — from the objects we’re painting, which are filled with it.

This process starts with our very first strokes. Rather than simply filling in our shape with paint, like we’ve all been taught to do throughout our lives, we instead paint in patches, silver-dollar-sized regions that might contain two or more different areas of color or value.

According to Jim, ideally you’d start with your darkest value, then medium, then light.

As I mentioned in my last post, we’re using the “fat over lean” process of painting — creating our paintings by laying down thin layers of paint that we then let dry before continuing to add to and revise. In order to keep the ability to revise the edges in future iterations, and to minimize the possibility that our surface will crack, we want to avoid the ridges that might come from having excess paint on our brushes when we come up to an edge. To do this we first touch down our brush well away from an edge and then paint toward it. Only when the paint has significantly thinned do we then paint along the edge.

Another way to make sure we’re not getting bamboozled by the “object-ness” of what we’re painting is to use a large hand mirror placed against our foreheads and reflecting on our painting and the subject we’re painting from, causing us to see them upside-down and backwards. This helps to break the connection between the shapes and lines that we’ve painted and the object that they represent, so that we can better see flaws in our angles, proportions, and values without the brain jumping in and trying to make our item look more vase-like, or hand-like, or in our case, oven-mitt-like.

So how did this all translate to Dopey and the Oven Mitt?

Remember, here was what I was painting:

withgrid

And here’s the final product:

Wait — is that a perfect copy? Is she really that good?

No! Psych — they’re the same! I didn’t have access to the original, so I just showed my finished painting instead.

But now, here’s the original:

church_by_river_wm

Still pretty close, right?

083116_AboveTheFireplace_9 — *Lookin’ good!*

So it’s not like spreading peanut butter? Laying down your paint

March 1, 2019August 31, 2020 ~ jcaritas ~ Leave a comment

I’m a big fan of expressive painters like Carole Marine and Patti Mollica, and if you’re one of those people who can sit down for an hour or two, pile on the paint with a palette knife, and come away with something like this, you can just go f–

…find a quiet place to paint. This doesn’t apply to you.

OpposingForces650 — *Keep spreading that peanut butter, Patti!*

But what if you’re a new painter, and it’s the visceral, immediate brushwork of Patti that makes your heart sing, rather than the smooth perfection of Leonardo? Shouldn’t you load up your brush, pour yourself an Old Fashioned (yum!) and go to town?

Yeah, I tried that:

firstpic2 — *Detail of an early work by a New Master*

Ick.

Now, what I did here is apparently a perfectly legitimate way to paint — it’s called alla prima, and it just means I did everything in one swell foop, creating the entire painting while everything was still good and wet. That would be all well and good if I liked it and didn’t want to go back.

But I don’t.

It’s ugly.

The trouble with alla prima for newbies like me is that it revs up the pressure. If you paint a big thick wet layer, it’s necessary to complete it in one sitting (or at least close-together sittings) for the obvious reason that it would be very difficult to revise all those ridges in the next go-round, and the less obvious — but more important — reason that painting a thin layer over a thicker layer will cause the surface to crack, as the top layer dries and the paint below remains wet and mobile at its core.

As a new painter, I’m still at the kids table. Don’t rush me when I’m trying to eat peas with a fork — that shit’s hard!

Instead, I want to be able to lay down a thin layer in the time I have allotted (usually the two hours of class), put the project down until the next class (or whenever), then pick it back up and refine, repeating as often as I like. (And if I don’t finish my layer, no worries!) I could even slap down a big, thick layer of expressive brushwork, alla patti, provided it’s on top. To avoid cracking, the rule you want to follow is “fat over lean”– always start with your leanest, thinnest layers (beginning with your toned canvas), and end with your thickest, most luscious.

But what about the amazing freedom that comes with painting fast, loose, and wet?

Wise woman, that Aunt Lydia.

In an upcoming post, I’ll return to “Dopey and the Oven Mitt,” to demonstrate how we created our layer (in this case, singular). Plus, the big reveal!

My very first painting. Don’t blame the school!

February 26, 2019February 27, 2019 ~ jcaritas ~ 2 Comments

Most of the biggest fights I’ve ever had with my husband came down to the fact that I’m a take-charge, active person, and he’s a passive cow. (He might’ve framed these fights differently. It’s MY blog.) So after so sensitively drawing Dopey and the Oven Mitt, I was anxious to lay in some paint. I had a space above the fireplace ready for it, and I don’t like to wait. (And that’s a GOOD thing.)

Alas, class wasn’t for another week, and my drawing was still locked up in The Art Academy’s thermohygrometer-monitored (I assume) vaults. But now that I had da skillz, I could start over — I could keep moving ahead!

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find this particular work in any of my old art history books. Instead, I searched online for something with the same clean lines, and found this:

istock

I knew I might have trouble with the little “iStock by Getty Images,” but the rest looked pretty easy. After all, I already knew how to tone my canvas, hold my paintbrush, prepare my palette, and draw with a grid. Also, I had been through childhood. I figured I got this.

So after preparing my palette and grid and drawing my lines (and holding my paintbrush!), I picked out some greys to use. (I probably would’ve gone straight for color — I don’t like to wait — but we hadn’t bought any). And I painted.

Pretty good, right?

firstpic

I mean, I knew I had some trouble with the little protuberances at the bottom — that I can blame on a bad lighting situation — but my curves looked pretty good, and I even did that cool gradient thing in the sky. We hadn’t even been taught that — extra credit!!

Then I brought it to class to show Jim.

I didn’t want to be one of those little suck-ups who does extra homework and then shows it off to the teacher — I know everyone hates that kid (I was that kid). So I framed it in terms of a question I really did want to know: When would I add the protuberances? Would I actually draw in those little details, or lay them in over the top of the other paint? But really, I wanted him to praise my natural talent. (I’m still a little suck-up at heart.)

He didn’t.

Jim is a very positive person, and I could see on his face that he was struggling mightily to say something kind. “It’s really great that you’re so…enthusiastic,” he managed. “But we’ll be talking more about the right way to put down paint in tonight’s demo.” The right way. Ouch.

The fact that there was a right way, though — even for such a simple painting — was obviously news to me. In my next post, I’ll show you what it was.

Back to Kindergarten! Drawing using a grid

February 25, 2019August 31, 2020 ~ jcaritas ~ 4 Comments

Did you have a book like this when you were a kid?

plants-and-zombies — *I like his other book better: “How to Draw Blenders and Policemen”*

If you’re anything like me, you’d probably feel pretty silly purchasing a book like this as an adult, subject matter aside. Even for those of us who never learned to draw, we know we really should be beyond making little grids and copying lines into them. Learning to draw using this method is pretty much the equivalent of learning how to paint by using Paint by Numbers.

Right?

Apparently not.

When we came to class our second day, Jim had already laid out the subject matter for our Very First Painting: a gridded mimeograph of… one of the Seven Dwarves talking to an oven mitt…?

image with grid — *This will be usefu…oh, wait, I don’t have hands.*

Our mission: Create a faithful representation of this early work of Surrealism, using a grid to guide us.

Taking out the toned canvasses we’d created in class the week before, we gridded them up in 2″x2″ squares using T-squares.

laying out a painting grid — *Matching up my lines. Forgot to mark the top!*

laying out a grid for painting — *I’m not a T-square, but I play one in this demo*

Note: Don’t use a graphite drawing pencil for this step. Use a regular #2. Over many, many years, as your oil paint gets more transparent, graphite will come to the top and be visible. (Of course, I hope to be beyond drawing with grids by the time I’m creating anything worth saving.)

mona-lisa.jpg!Large — *Is there a grid under there?*

Then, we mixed our palettes, and after a demonstration from Jim, we were ready to draw.

grid and painting — *All ready! I’m right-handed, so my painting goes on the right.*

I used my long watercolor brush for this. I started with a shorter brush, but I was told I couldn’t hold it in the proper way for drawing with a brush that short.

Choose a color that’s similar to the color of your toned canvas, but slightly lighter or darker. You want to be able to see it, but it shouldn’t stand out.

We started with just two dots. Easy-peasy! (Jim congratulated us on successfully completing our dots. It’s a very positive place!)

Using the grids was very helpful. How close to the top of the square should my line be?

Also, what was the angle of the line I was drawing? For this, we needed to use our brush as an “angle machine.”

holding up brush to check angle — *Figuring out an angle.*

First, I’d mark a dot where I think it should be in order to get the correct angle. Then, I’d test the angle against the original and steadily move my arm over to my painting to compare. Then I’d adjust the position if necessary.

Don’t worry if you’re off with your dots or even your lines. For better or worse, oil paint dries veeerrryy slowly. You can always blot out the offender with a paper towel. Also don’t worry if you’re unsteady — it’s much easier to get a better line when we’re filling everything in with paint. Even Jim’s lines looked shaky when he demonstrated.

another canvas with shaky lines

Another thing to keep in mind is that we’re not drawing curves at this point. Everything should be basically straight. The line that I’m creating above is a curve in the original image. It would be very difficult to copy the curvature correctly, so instead we draw straight lines of the correct width for the straighter part of the curve (the isolated short line you see above) and then “connect the dots.” This gives us a better approximation of the curve then if we had tried it freehand. More curvature can be added when filling in the paint.

canvas with finished drawing — *The finished product. Get that girl an agent!*

So why do we use paint for drawing out our composition, rather than pencil?

Hey, I’m only in my second class! But I BELIEVE it has something to do with leading us into the “real” process we’ll be using to create our paintings in the future: underpainting.

And what’s an underpainting, you ask?

How could I not know this? How to hold a paintbrush

February 24, 2019August 31, 2020 ~ jcaritas ~ 1 Comment

When was the first time you held a paintbrush? For me it was April 27, 1975 — give or take a few years. It’s one of those things no one remembers, because it happens so early and is so ubiquitous throughout our childhoods — how many paintings of bright suns and happy trees must exist in the scrapbooks of grandmas all over the world?

btatn23516tranh-16_22_49_895 — *I love you, Grandma!*

How then did so many of us manage to get through elementary school (not to mention high school and beyond) never learning the proper way to hold a brush? Where were our art teachers? (I’m looking at YOU, Mr. Black.)

On our second day of class, every one of us adult art students choked up on our brush. It was difficult not to — we were attempting to draw with our brushes (more on that in the next post) and placing my hands far away from the tip made my lines wobble like an EKG.

abnormality-in-an-ekg — *Clearly my lines need some medical attention.*

According to Jim, we’re supposed to hold our brushes well back from the ferrule, and gently, so that someone could easily knock them out of our hands. Like this:

small-portrait-painting-oil-glazing-techniques_edited-1 — *Ouch!*

…Not like this:

The movement, according to Jim, is not in the fingers but in the arm. As an example, he told us about a particular famous artist (this anecdote would be a whole lot better if I could remember who the heck it was) who suffered from severe arthritis. Every morning he’d have his assistants strap his brush …to his arm.

Weird.

Four weeks into class (just catching up to real time with this blog) I still find this technique pretty awkward, especially when I first sit down. A few minutes into painting, though, it starts to feel more natural, and I do think I’m starting to see an improvement in my lines from week to week.

Hey, at least I don’t have to do it like this:

huang-gofu-painting — *It’s not in the toes, it’s in the leg…*

From short to joyful – preparing my palette

February 24, 2019August 31, 2020 ~ jcaritas ~ 1 Comment

Used to be, whenever I’d think of an artist, busy in her studio, I’d pictured her as follows. She’d have brushes, probably several. She’d stand at an easel. She’d be wearing a beret (just kidding). And she’d have one of those white plastic palettes with all the little wells to keep her paints nice and clean.

Wait — no?

palette

As I learned in my second class – no. Though it varies by brand, most oil paint starts out “short,” a nasty word (He was short with me because I came up short in painting) when what we want is for it to be “joyful.” For this, we need medium.

Painting Medium

2 parts Walnut Alkyd Medium
2 parts Gamsol (Gamsol is an Odorless Mineral Solvent — basically turpentine without the stink and braincell killers)

Mix!

It should look like this:

Painting Medium — No, I’m not taking a drug test — that’s my painting medium!

All oil paint has oil in it (it’s true!) — typically linseed oil, from the seed of the Lin (actually, I have no idea what kind of oil linseed is). Gamblin paints, though, don’t have very much, making them stiff (or short) to use straight from the tube. In order to make them flow, and have the glossy, buttery, luscious consistency we’re looking for (what Jim calls “joyful”), we need to add some extra oil and solvent: our medium.

Note: You could use linseed oil instead of walnut oil in your medium — it actually dries faster than walnut oil (a lovely thing when you have to cart paintings back and forth to class) — but it will become more yellow than walnut over time. (And by time I mean — say it with me — 200 years…).

According to Jim, many artists have learned to do what I used to do — dip the brush first into medium, and then into paint (though I seem to recall instead dipping straight into — horrors! — turpentine). The problem with this method is that any yellowing you’ll see over time will be inconsistent, because some of your brushstrokes will have more oil than others. That’s a lot harder to compensate for with lighting. Instead, you’ll need to mash your medium directly into your paint, and for that, those cute little wells just ain’t going to cut it.

In class we use tempered glass as our palette, with a backing of little swatches of all of our greys to remind us what to put where. That’s awesome while I’m there, but being a little, um, short on cash I just hate wasting all of that unused paint, only to have to remix it all again the next time I sit down. Instead, I just bought this Masterson Artist Palette Seal, which will allow me to close up my box of paints until the next session. Handy dandy! You use it with palette paper, so when you’re done with a project you just scoop up the paper and trash it. Nice!

If you’re following this method, and painting without color, you’ll have five paints: Titanium White, Portland Light Grey, Portland Medium Grey, Portland Dark Grey, and Ivory (?) Black.

When you’re ready to paint, squeeze out an inch or so of each in a row from black to white, with a space in the middle of Portland Medium and Portland Dark to create a blend of the two.

Dip the back of your brush into your painting medium, and drip about 4 drops onto each blob of paint (the amount of paint in my photo would probably just take a drop per pile!). Taking your palette knife, cut them in and continue to mash up each pile of paint, scraping up regularly to keep your piles small and neat (I’m not there yet with this skill.). You’ll probably find you need more medium — it should be around the consistency of shaving cream (if shaving cream feels joyful. Maybe you get more joy from… sour cream? Me, I like shaving my legs.)

mashingpaint

You’re ready to paint!

In my next post, I’ll talk about holding the brush. Who knew this was something I could do wrong?