Studio Time

Before:

After:

This is pretty typical of the work I’ve been doing lately. (My son calls them “chaotic”.) I have twenty five or thirty of them going. They tend to get to be unworkable when I’ve painted in a lot of shapes and force me to spend half my time cleaning paint off of my hand and wiping smeared paint off of things. If I work on a bunch of them at once, it saves me remixing paint, leaving excess on the palette to dry up and go to waste, and… it keeps me from getting bored.

This is basically an automatic drawing done in watercolor pencil, sealed with clear acrylic and blocked in with oils. …A detail of it anyway. It’s stretched on a stretcher that’s a bit larger than the final image will be. The actual painting is a couple of inches larger. It’s a little (lot) more work but it allows me to stretch it on an appropriately sized stretcher and wrap the image around the edges. It saves framing and looks a lot better than the raw edges.

I glazed this with Indian yellow this morning. It may look overly “yellow” at the moment but the glaze evens out the paint film and gives things some consistency. When I go back into it and add the final colors, blend stuff, shade it and so on, it will take the paint a little easier. Of course the yellows are pretty much finished. 🙂

The colors in the first image are fairly typical for me… cobalt blue, cadmium orange, chrome green, naples yellow, cobalt violet, cadmium red deep, caput mortuum, burnt sienna, mars yellow, etc, etc, etc…

( 🙂 Lets hope those Winsor-Newton links don’t go anywhere.)