Baseline yourself
Regardless of where you are in your career, you will do well to establish a baseline for your oil-painting toolkit. The baseline provides a powerful framework that you can use to analyze materials and techniques.…
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Wrong again?
A reader said he tried sun-thickened oil on my recommendation but it didn't demonstrate the handling quality that I'd claimed for it. Secret sauce and other seasonings Sun-thickened oil has the happy quality of maintaining…
Turpentine diaries 2/17/19
I finished the underpainting today for Portrait of a Man Wearing Sunglasses, my second session with the painting. The painting is 32" x 48." Simple composition. Unlike last week's Fork, I transferred the design to…
White lake
Yesterday, Lake Erie exhibited the sluggishness that precedes freezing, and this morning we see the frozen tundra. The winds calmed but the wind chill is below zero. I am a little under the weather today--a…
Turpentine diaries 1/13/19
Booth at the Fair ( or At the Fair or The Fair) is 44" x 60," which makes it one of the larger canvases I've worked on recently. I am working on the drawing for…
Fat over lean
So you've embraced the two related studio aphorisms I discussed in this recent post: fat over lean, and make the lights thick but keep the darks thin. In practical terms what does this mean? Oil…
Turpentine diaries 12/31/2018
Art is filled with aphorisms. Fat over lean, for instance, is a famous adage. The meaning for this old saw that is the most straightforward is to paint thickly-applied paint over thinly-applied paint. Why this…
Christmas 2018
This was the first Christmas when our children didn't wake at dawn. My youngest, home from his Freshman year at college, didn't get up until lunchtime! So we had a leisurely morning around the stout…