| ~ | Just like in the summer of 2004 where I decided to revisit acrylic painting, the winter holiday of 2004/5 I have used for painting in oils. The main focus for my personal development has to be technique. Acrylic is wonderful for quick, expressive developments of drawing into colour. It is immediate and lends itself to Alla Prima painting onto white grounds very well. However, it is a race against the clock since the medium dries so fast. Acrylic retardants are not really an option because they are milky white while wet. That makes mixing colours impractical, but oils really excel at this. |  |
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| The current work in oils should be seen as an exploration of the medium – so that I can pass on my experiences to students. So far, the best ones are painted onto a dark ground and use light and dark colours to develop the tonal range in both directions symmetrically. |  |
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| This picture(right) started out with an alla prima approach, but then I added some glazes in linseed oil. Probably not technically a good way to do it, but this problem was tackled in the next picture. | |||
On the right, there is a more refined image of an imaginary pilot. I used a dark brown ground, ( burnt umber). Then painted in thin turps diluted white/orange mix the general features. Later after a few days to dry, added thicker oil/turps mixed medium layers to give the skin tones more depth. The last layers were only diluted with linseed oil. As the piece progressed, I found it necessary to use thinner and thinner brushes, finishing off with a No. 4 Dalon round. There is a considerable shift in approach when working on oil, turps layers a can be a bit fragile, it is too easy to lift the paint off with subsequent brushing. It is therefore best to let the piece dry at this stage. This can mean you finish any possible work on the picture in a short time, thus freeing up time to work on another. this way your workspace can contain a number of pieces at various stages of completion. In a painting session you may be able to work on a number of pictures. |
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Above is the start of a new picture of a figure, taken from my A6 sketchbooks. The ground was prepared with white/black mixed acrylic, then a thin layer of very dilute burnt umber over that to give a little warmth. Basic underpainting is all turps plus oil paint. The second photo has a bit of a blue cast which was hard to get rid of before uploading these pages. Most of the work above was done with a No.6 round brush. |
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The next stage should include development of the whole image, firstly in thinner turpentine thinned oil colour , and worked with some attention to all areas of the image. Some parts will need a higher proportion of my time depending on it importance. The third picture is probably the last one to use entirely turps as s thinner. I expect to begin linseed oil layers next.
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Another one on the go at the same time. It seems best with a medium that dries so slowly to work on several at once. this time, the ground is Burnt Siennar colour, applied thinly with some streaks. Sketching shapes was done with heavily diluted orange, using turps medium. |
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There is a lot of oil medium in this last session's layer, I expect it to take ages to dry. | ||
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<- final copy of the quilt jacket painting. I declare it complete as of today (5th March 2005). It's quite a deal for many artists to decide when a picture is finished and therefore when to actually stop working on it. Even with Oil's more structured approaches, it still seems a hard decision to make. Final layers were painted exclusively using linseed medium. I had to change the left shoulder because in this image it was too high |
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NEW Picture. Started March 2005 The picture ( left) shows underpainting and turps based oil bulit up a little thicker than usual, probably because I hadn't really decided on the colour range to use when it was started. It is still not resolved, for example where does the blue in the brush come from, the rest of the scene is not illuminated with much blue light. It will have to wait a week or so when linseed layers are bult up to change the colour. |
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Finished another! A4 onto canvas textured paper.2nd May 2005 | ||
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 Spoonhead is done, the above is a link to a larger picture. This is part two in a "domestic series" The 3rd part is on canvas. |
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the Feet thing was made for my smn space - and also because I am a interested in natural light when working from life.
More detailed descriptions of ongoing work can be found on my blog site. NEXT Oil gallery page |
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