Flake white is critical for oil painting. I buy flake white from RGH, Blue Ridge, and (occasionally) Utrecht. I discovered this past weekend that Utrecht doesn’t sell flake white any longer. This unwanted discovery kills the Utrecht brand for me. Their oil paint is decidedly on the low-end of professional brands. Except for their flake…
I’ve written a lot about the small paint manufacturer RGH for several reasons. First, I always support the small suppliers who are inspired by a high view of the craft. Suppliers such as RGH and James Grove are rare. Importantly, they continue to produce the all-important lead-based paints. Also, I use their stuff in my…
Sable brushes are the best. There’s no debate about this. Sure, there are some use cases where the benefits of sable are irrelevant. The fine control provided by sables is lost on large-format oil paintings, for example. So on large paintings, why go to the expense? And–oh boy!–sable brushes are expensive. I paid $60+ over…
Like the title says, I bought some manganese violet. Some artists maintain that they can reproduce every color by using a small collection of paints. While it’s true that you can create a tremendous variety of colors with a limited palette, it’s not true that you can reproduce every color that way. There are a…
Stiff paint, stiff muscles, stiff brain. This describes my afternoon. I finished a painting this morning and celebrated with a piece of pumpkin pie leftover from Thanksgiving. Back in the studio, I started working on this large painting that is in mid-career. Not in the starting stage but nowhere near the finishing stage either. I…
Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, likes to say that degrees from the nonprestigious schools are just expensive dunce caps. He means that today higher education is close to worthless, except that degrees from the top schools still get you interviews. I think he’s right. Don’t go to college unless you’re in the right STEM…
I was a little rusty with watercolors when I started this painting. It’s good-quality paper but I forgot to dampen it before I started. Duh. I finally got it going and finished it quickly (for me–2 sessions). I plan a series of small (9″ x 12″) watercolors like this one. The goal is to keep…
My recently-started watercolor cycle represents the first watercolors that I’ve done for sometime. I still have a good supply of colors, papers, and brushes. Of course, I never use my watercolor brushes for oils. This photo shows my favorite watercolor palette. It has enough compartments to contain my normal color selection. My watercolor palette contains…