Category: Paintings
Retouch varnish
When you work on an oil painting over an extended period, colors sometimes become dull. The upper paint layers merge with an earlier layers. This process is called sinking in. If the problem isn't corrected,…
Maulsticks
When my daughter was very young, with a very serious face she asked, "Daddy, why do you hold a big stick in your studio?" To a child, the most question-provoking thing about the studio was…
Good flake white
Utrecht flak white continues to surprise me with its good performance. Considering its modest price, it's a good value. I am using it throughout this painting titled The Fair. It covers well and handles crisply.…
Paint bigly
I am painting three new canvases that fit the bigly category. Big for me, is 4' x 5' or thereabouts. In the preceding weeks, I was drawing bigly too--working on the drawings for the new…
Scale again
Yesterday, I wrote about how scale affects paint handling. A figure on a 6-inch canvas is painted differently than the same figure on a 6-foot canvas. Pretty straightforward but a lot of artists get stuck…
Proper scale
Scale plays a big part in how I handle a painting. By scale I mean the size of the canvas. A single figure on a 6-foot canvas requires a different treatment than the same figure…
Starting another painting
The drawing is transferred to the canvas for the new painting I'm calling The Entertainer. The Entertainer is 40" x 50". I applied the warm ground with a rag. I was careful to keep the…