For the past week or so, I’ve worked exclusively on drawings. More precisely, designs for paintings, as the one illustrated below. These design-focused drawings will be covered by paint. The one illustrated here is the smallest painting of the current crop. The others are 40″ x 54″ and bigger. This means that I can spend…
I bought a brush set from Fuumuui: 8-piece kolinsky sable watercolor brushes. This is a tremendous bargain at $21.99 on Amazon. I used the brushes on one of my oil paintings and they performed passably much to my surprise. I expect they’ll fall apart quickly under the abuse of oil painting with its strong solvents.…
My 10-year-old Dell XPS laptop finally died. With its core i7, it was pretty hot back in 2013. I replaced its Windows OS with Linux some years ago and it was still performing acceptably. There were issues, of course. I prefer lightweight devices these days but the XPS is on the beefy side, which means…
I take back all the nice things I said about titanium white. I was never a fan of titanium white but after trying some of Michael Hading’s versions of the color, warm white and unbleached white, I decided to give it another chance. My preferred white, flake white, is orders of magnitude more expensive than…
I keep my oils in two cabinets. Here is the red drawer. I hate running out of things while I work–it’s a mania. Painting is like taking a journey and I don’t want the journey to end prematurely. That’s one reason I have a lot of paint. I also test and review brands, brands that…
The Germany-based art supplier Kremer was the best source for hard-to-find items not long ago. Now? It’s impossible to complete orders online, not difficult–impossible. I recently attempted to place an online order with Kremer’s U.S. location. The order contained two items that Kremer flagged with special handling requirements. One of the items is black oil…
My brush graveyard is getting too big. I throw out most of my worn-out brushes. I’ve also been known to snap in two misbehaving brushes. Those I also throw out. But my favorites I inter into the graveyard after distinguished service. I started pruning the graveyard to make room. Having a lot of brushes extends…
I screwed up my website while I was improving it yesterday. The site was down for 24 hours due to a series of foul-ups. I expected the site to be down for a short time after implementing the changes, so it took some time before I realized something was wrong. Things should be back to normal now.