there are rules...

…in painting that make the process more enjoyable when observed - like starting with the dark tones and slowly introducing the lighter tones as the painting progresses. In oil painting this rule is a good rule to follow, but this rule doesn’t really apply to acrylic painting because of the fast drying nature of acrylic paint.

It’s absolutely fine (as far as i’m concerned) to start an acrylic painting with the lightest value and work all over from the value scale as randomly as possible.

Oils on the other hand…

I hadn’t touched my oils for a while so I thought I’d do a couple of studies using similar limited pallets to the acrylic studies I’ve been doing of late, (3 colour studies with a mid tone being my darkest tone) and I found myself introducing the light tones early on in the painting process, right at the start, breaking the rule of dark tones to light… I kind of went… mid tone…light…mid…light…(“help I need to add an extra dark option”, added 1 more colour to my pallet - raw umber in this case)… dark…detail.

Cad yellow was used in both studies, with permanent rose and manganese blue hue in one of them, and cad red and cerulean blue in the other. At the very end of each painting I needed a dark tweak - burnt umber to the first and prussian blue to the second - three colours per painting + white + a tweak, and I blame the overpowering nature of the cad yellow for needing this tweak. Both paintings were alla prima - they were painted from start to finish in one sitting, not allowing the paint to dry in-between stages.

The next oil study I’m going to do I will try a classic complex pallet.

This will be something like:

Viridian green, Alizarin Crimson, Transparent red oxide, burnt sienna, Cad red deep, Cad red light, yellow ochre, titanium white, cerulean blue, ultramarine blue and ivory black. (I googled it)

Note the yellow in the above example of a classic pallet, there’s just the one which is not a strong yellow at all, and the next closest thing to yellow in this pallet is the green which is pretty dark.

I plan to post the study with the classic pallet next week…

stay tuned.

oil studies,

1/ daughter in Cad yellow, Permanent Rose, Manganese Blue Hue + white + Burnt Umber

2/ study in Cad Yellow, Cad Red, Cerulean blue, + white + Prussian Blue

see my struggle with the limited oil pallet on youtube:

the struggles are real…

Indian Yellow...

…has been around for-like-ever, but is a colour that I’ve only recently started using myself.

Even though I put it in the “dirty yellow” box along with yellow ochre, Naples yellow and raw sienna, Indian yellow is clean and bright by comparison and this is because it’s transparent. I guess it’s in the dirty yellow pile because it has an orange/brown quality to it.

Indian yellow was first used in 15th century India. It was made from the urine of cows fed on mango leaves which contain a toxin called urushiol. The cows became very unhealthy with this diet but their urine produced the precious pigment which was dried to a powder and the powder was formed into balls of yellow pigment which was shipped around the world while it’s source remained a mystery. No one knew what it was made from until 1880something.

It was around the time of the discovery of how the yellow was made (Sir Joseph Hooker’s work), that the pigment disappeared off the market…something about animal cruelty…there’s not much of a record about this except his letter of enquiry to the Indian Department of Revenue and Agriculture.

Luckily for me, and every other artist who loves the colour and loves cows, Indian yellow is now a synthetic replication of the original pigment.

The thing I love about Indian yellow is how it mixes with other colours. It’s not a yellow I would use without mixing it with some other colour - like I’ve tried it as a colour by itself in a background and it doesn’t work for me on it’s own, it’s not beautiful on it’s own but boy oh boy does it mix well with other colours. It makes gorgeous oranges when mixed with reds and pinks, it makes wonderful greens when mixed with blue and other greens and that’s why I love it so much.

playing around with Indian yellow

Indian yellow study of daughter no. 2

art study...

…is playing around with different concepts, ideas and materials in preparation for something larger.

It’s play really, well…the kind of art-studying I’ve been doing this last week feels, to me, like play.

I must be learning something… I’m trying things that I haven’t tried before, but it seems more like I’m confirming things that I assume will happen because I’ve kind-of done something sort-of-like-it before, or I’ve seen something maybe done in a similar way somewhere, but haven’t put it to the test for myself.

Every study is somewhat different from the one preceding it, but similar enough to guarantee some degree of success, and success is enjoyable - so there’s the repetition and the pleasure of knowing there will likely be success and that is what makes it more like play, I think.

“Play is the work of children” - so I figure that in order to make it age appropriate work I’ll sum it all up with the writing of this weekly blog which feels more like work than the art studies do, but is more like play than the art studies are.

One thing I’ve learnt from writing these blogs is to save what I write as I go. There’s no pleasure at all in accidentally deleting a well thought out paragraph or two because you didn’t have the foresight to save them before the phone rings and you close the page in a multitasking fluster… …and my “ iCloud storage” has been “full” for at least 5 years.

Art studies are suppose to solve problems in preparation for the finished work.

One thing I’ve learnt from problem solving with art studies is that I need some problems to solve…

…and that got me thinking…

…maybe it’s the creating of new and interesting problems, and not just the solving of them, that makes art study different than play.

White paint...

…makes grey paint when you mix it with various browns. You don’t need black to make grey.
White paint lightens colours to make pastels, it can also intensify the colour when used sparingly but when used liberally it desaturates the colour. It makes colours dull as it lightens them - so what should be brighter tones will loose vibrancy and appear dull as the opaque pigment replaces colour with tint to make lighter but less brighter tones.

It’s a bit of a paradox using white.

The most common whites are opaque.
Antique white is warm and creamy, I use that as well as titanium which is cooler and usually pretty strong because it’s opaque, and unbleached titanium (which is kind of beige), not really white, but certainly light.

There’s zinc white which I believe is meant to be transparent, I have a tube in oils but I haven’t studied it yet. Apparently it’s good for keeping colours vibrant when lightening them because of its cool transparency. I’ll do a study on zinc white soon out of curiosity. (Mental note…I’ll write it in my diary later).

There’s led white too which is warm, opaque and extremely toxic. Titanium has replaced led as the most used white because of its toxicity. I’ve never used led white myself, probably never will even though it was the favourite white of many great painting masters and is meant to be lovely…

White is a colour in nature but in paint it’s the absence of colour meaning you can’t mix the colour white, rather the paint is made without adding colour but taking it away (think unbleached titanium).

So the rule of thumb in painting is to use white sparingly…unless, ofcourse, you want to use it liberally to make the work all about white, which is what I’ve attempted to do with this pot and blog.

colour pallet using Indian yellow, magenta pink and Prussian blue, + lots of white

What should I paint next?..

I have a list about a mile long of things I want to paint and of things I need to paint that will bring me up to speed with requests, commissions and various projects I’ve expressed interest in. They are all exciting and I want to attend to them all at once. It is impossible to do them all at once, of course.

To resolve this fortunate problem I allocate time for the work that I need to do, and for the work that I want to do, during the days that I paint (most days).

I’ve talked about my commission work in a previous blog - I set time aside early in the morning for that…usually before breakfast. I’m working on a commission right now in-between writing these sentences for this blog. It’s a nearly finished little animal portrait, and to complete it I am doing a series of little touchups and corrective tweaks, and after each set of these thoughtful brush marks I turn away from the painting, write a sentence here then turn back to it with “fresh eyes”, and this helps me from over working the painting and losing some of the spontaneity of the first marks of paint…(that’s what I tell myself, anyway)…

You see it takes time to finish paintings…time spent thinking about it not actually painting it, and sometimes this can feel like procrastinating…(come to think of it maybe that’s exactly what it is), so it’s helpful to have some other simple tasks to do in-between each set of tweaks, like housework, checking emails, bookwork, blogging…starting a new painting….except the problem with starting a new painting is that you can get so caught up in it that before you know it you’ve got two paintings that need finishing…or three…or twenty paintings that need finishing.

It’s important to finish paintings - by finish I mean as finished as they can possibly be kind-of-finished. That means signed, dated, ready to hang, photographed and shipped kind-of-finished.

For me it works best to spend time finishing paintings in the mornings, a hour minimum each morning so that I can feel like I’ve worked productively, done what i’m suppose to do and then be free to explore or start something new later in the day, something fun, or a thing I’m curious about or have been meaning to try, or a study or a request…

…which may very well end up on the morning pile, needing to be finished.

My youngest was…

…presented a little jar of flowers after the opening night of her first Fringe Festival performance, she’s in the circus, so I thought I’d paint them while they still looked fresh.

Art Study...

The thought occurred to me the other day - what am I actually studying when draw or paint some random heads found on the internet? Am I studying the heads, the paint, or the process?

At first I thought I was studying heads but it doesn’t really matter who’s head I’m painting when I do these little studies because I’m looking for an arrangement of light and shadow that’s interesting, dramatic and exciting.

I never wonder “who are these people?” I never wonder what their lives are like…it’s hard to put context into the found heads without making up stories, and I’m not making up stories about them in these studies.

not really…

One head came with a name - a name written under the head - Celine. I’ve drawn Celine at least 5 times.

It’s very different when I paint people with context though - be that people I know or people I’ve been asked to paint, celebrities or even a self portrait. Context changes the work from a study to a painting, and I think this is because now I have a story to tell.

paintings are visual stories

so…

I suppose what I’m really studying when I select random heads off the internet is the process and the materials.

Celine

Know thy colours…

A good way to understand a particular colour is to mix it with other colours and with white. Mixing a colour with other colours shows its strengths and weaknesses. A transparent colour does different things when mixed with another colour than what a similar opaque version of it does, as does a cool or warm version of the same colour, like different kinds of red.

Mixing a colour with white opens up the colour so you can see it more clearly. Dark colours, like midnight blue, Paynes grey and Dioxazine purple can all look the same when they are in little piles on your pallet, but a little bit of white mixed into each colour immediately shows how different they are from each other.

Below are two examples of almost the same colour pallet, but I’ve used a different red.

In the first painting (pear) I’ve used light red ochre which is opaque, Aqua green light which is opaque and pastel, transparent Indian yellow and white.

In the second painting I changed the red ochre to transparent Magenta and the other colours are the same.

light Red Ochre vs Transparent Magenta

the earthy colour of the red ochre is warm and brownish compared to the vibrant cool, transparent magenta, and the green is pastel which didn’t allow me to mix a strong dark so I needed to adjust all my other tones to create the illusion of a strong dark.

Acrylic paint…

…has it’s advantages and disadvantages.

I totally love how quickly it dries, that you can wash brushes out in water and that it doesn’t smell as strongly as oil based paints.
The quick drying factor means that you can put down a layer of paint and 10 minutes later you can put another layer of paint on top of the dry paint. Laying wet paint over dry paint like this is my favourite way to paint.
The most annoying disadvantage of acrylic paint is that on a warm day the paint literally starts drying on your brush before you finish laying it off on your painting. It dries on the pallet too before you’ve finished using it, so you need to clean and refresh your pallet several times during a painting session or you get frustrated with the drying lumps of paint that look wet but won’t move when you try to stick your brush in it. It then becomes a hunt for the tiny bits of paint that are still wet enough to paint with. This is most frustrating at the end of a session when you might have one or two tiny corrections to do which requires a minuscule bit of paint but there’s just dried paint on the pallet so you have to put out your colours again and mix the tiniest bit of colour up to match the part you want to correct which leads to…
…the other most annoying disadvantage of acrylic paint is that acrylic paint dries darker, so it’s very difficult to colour match for corrections. This is because the acrylic resin in the paint is opaque and white when wet but dries clear…and correcting with the wrong colour or tone is like opening up a can of worms…

Study in acrylics on a hot day.

Commissioned Paintings…

…is part of the work that I do and presents it’s own set of challenges, the biggest of those being time.

The weirdest thing about painting commissions is that if I don’t have a set deadline for the commissioned work to be finished by it’s much more difficult to complete within a reasonable time frame. It’s also more difficult to get started.

Without a deadline a painting that should take me 3 weeks can take me more than a year.
It’s not necessarily that I take more time actually painting it, but I take more time thinking about what to do to start it - what materials to use? what colours? composition?…what process to start with?
After I’ve made some choices that set the stage for the work and I actually start painting it, I’ll spend more time than necessary between painting sessions looking at it and thinking about what to do next…as I’m doing that I‘ll procrastinate and start working on other things, clean the studio…go shopping…do some cooking…play around with new painting ideas…make a YouTube video…etc…there’s no hurry so there’s plenty of time to think about the commission…and think…and…think…

When there is a deadline, what I do to get things done on time is I set up my paints in the evenings, then I get up very early the following morning and do an hour before breakfast. I set the timer and work the full hour without interruption while I drink my morning pot of plunger coffee. The whole process is very enjoyable and when the hour is up, I feel a sense of accomplishment that affords me some extra time to explore ideas, later in the morning, that aren’t so urgent…which might even be another commission that doesn’t have a deadline.

commissioned paintings - see here

Honey Inside, 30x30cm