In the past several weeks, airplanes of a certain manufacture have had problems. Faulty door bolts allowed an exit fly off midflight and luckily no one went flying out into the atmosphere. In another incidence, the front wheel of the plane fell off before taking flight. And, apparently, airplanes and jets are not the only large craft with problems – ships, too, can be poorly built and / or designed.
What is this world coming to with such shoddy workmanship?
Over the next several weeks I am enrolled in a couple of oil painting classes. Acrylic paints really do frustrate me in a lot of ways, and please me in others, but it is time to work with oil paints on a more serious level. Let’s see where it goes.
To get ready for these classes, I pulled out some of my supplies. Of course, the oil paints come out – I have a smaller selection of colors than any other medium! I also have canvases in panel and mounted format. However, I did need to stock up on linseed oil, solvent, and other such stuff. And then paint.
Canvas mounted on panels is actually, I think, the easiest way to go. Canvas pads flop around and easily bend. Mounted canvas on stretcher bars takes up a lot of space but can provide a gratifying surface to paint on if properly and tightly mounted and prepared. For now I am using canvas panels which, while not super high quality, are relatively inexpensive and easy enough to prepare, if at all, prior to painting.
I love pears! Painting them is far less tasty than eating them, but they are by far one of my favorite winter fruits. Here, some d’Anjous, all cuddled together. My focus here was brushwork and getting a sense of the unctuous quality of oil paints. Some people use the paints straight out of the tube, but I like mine to slide around a bit. It really makes for fun blending. The colors, too, were rather limited here for the purpose of seeing how they can interact.
Here, more lavender fields. Why so many? It is because lavender and purple are honestly rather nasty colors to create from the standard mixes. I find that I like to have “convenience colors” on hand – namely, a good violet such as carbazole or dioxazine. Mixed with other colors and / or white, I get lavenders and such that appeal to me. I initially tried to just use variants of red, blue, and white for the lavenders, but gave up with frustration. Not worth the sweat! Maybe later I will master a good orchid lavender, but for now . . .
As with the pears, playing with the things you can add to the oil paints to thin them out. I used Gamsol and Soy-Thin, both low odor solvents. I didn’t use any linseed oil in either painting – that will come later – as will other things, such as drying agents like alkyds.
The pears and the lavender field were painting on pre-gessoed 10×10 cotton canvas panels measuring 10×10 inches square.
Pretty fancy title for an attempt to 1) take a color photo of pears, 2) reduce the colors in the photo to 16 so that fields of color appear, thus allowing an easier visualization of values, and 3) painting observed fields.
First, let’s put this out there: I really do not like painting outside at this point. I used my gouache paints for this study and had to take the following out to the table on the patio in multiple trips – paints, brushes, water, paper towels, image on a tablet, palette. Of course I forgot this and then forgot that, and it really just riles me up! If I ever want to have a plein air experience, everything needs to be consolidated in one thing to take all the little things out at the same time. Inefficient usage of my art supplies really makes me crazy. It is soooooo much easier to have everything in one place on a shelf rather than having to traipse hither, thither, and yon.
Okay, gripe session over. Using gouache on hot press paper, I used green in different values to depict light and shadow, somewhat successfully. I referred to my simplified image (which kept turning itself off on the tablet – another reason why painting from a reference photo indoors is so much nicer), and worked from there. Some areas of the pears were more yellow, as pears can be, and other areas were a colder green. This did end up showing in the simplified photo, and you can see it in the above painting.
I like to desaturate color photos or paintings to see how they read in black and white. This way I can get a sense of values in the colors I used. In the above painting, you can see that, overall, it worked in the pears. The shadows beneath the pears were nothing special and honestly not something I paid much attention to. Using desaturation, I see faults and areas for improvement. For example, the neck of the middle pear would benefit from more dark shades – middle values – to create a sense of the cylindrical nature of that part of the pear.
This was actually fun once I got into it, despite my frustrations with the outdoor set up. I have to think more about how I go about painting outdoors. The fact is the day was beautiful and nearly 70F for a bit of the afternoon. No wind to fight with. Later this week the rains will return (hooray!), so getting outside was probably the main point! Painting was just something to do . . .
Winter is all over the place today – arctic blasts and cold temperature records. Snow in the South where snow is a rarity. Even the desert sees snow – a fact that never ceases to amaze me because to me a desert is hot, dry, and filled with sand and palm trees. Evidently not here!
First time using Hahnemuhle 140# CP paper, 9×12.
Yesterday I refilled an old travel palette with new watercolors. This meant rummaging through my paints, discarding dried up tubes of paint, and sorting them out. This is always fun as I get to choose my colors out of the collection that has accumulated over time as well as just clean things up.
I don’t know about other people, but I really like my stuff – of which I have scads – to be organized and tidy in all its scaddiness.
Baggies are great for this. Permanent markers label them, too, to help me sort things out. Categories include red, blue, yellow, orange, earth colors, teal & turquoise, violet, neutral-white-grey-black, green, and maybe a few others. If a color leaks, the baggie keeps things from oozing everywhere and when this happens, the offending bag is dumped into a bowl of water, the offending tube(s) removed, the rest of the tubes cleaned and dried, and moved into a new home. We are all happy.
Ink, Yarn & Beer 