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…
Turpentine diaries 2/10/19
I had good painting sessions with Fork. The painting is so large, 4.5 x 5.5 feet, that I started painting portions of it before I completed all parts of the drawing. Today I completed the…
Turpentine diaries 2/3/19
I finished these three paintings today. Yeah, that's a lot for me. But all of them have been 'almost' done for some time. Paintings can represent problems to solve and after I solve them, if…
Murder on brushes
The first session with my new painting, Fork, mangled a new brush. Fork is a large painting, 54" x 66". Because it's so large I am not transferring a cartoon to the canvas but drawing…
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 1/20/2019
NE Ohio was pounded by a winter storm overnight. At noon, we--my wife, daughter, and me--braved the gusting winds and blowing snow to clear the driveway. We had to shovel through snow drifts just to…