Gallery Bio Resources Plein Air Contact Log in   Resources For the artists among you, here are some resources I have found helpful in my artistic journey. Books Web sites Colour Golden Mean Working with oils Now I work exclusively with oils. I started out with watercolours, wanting to get some colour into my drawings. I moved from there to acrylics and then to oils. They seem to suit me best. Nice to use, the colours don't change as they dry (acrylics do) and with the fast drying oils (alkyds) I now use I have a dry surface to work on by the following day. Traditional oils can take a week to be touch dry in the winter and that gives plenty of scope for dust to land on the paint in the interim. Besides which, when the creative urge is happening, I just want to continue with the painting. Waiting a week for the paint to dry is out of the question. The working time with fast drying oils is about two hours before the paint starts to become sticky. That is about long enough for one session for me. If you want to work longer than that, just get small amounts of paint out of the tube at a time. Painting Process I start with some very thin paint (thinned with turps), usually blue because it is a dark value, to do an initial drawing with the brush. This step is to get placement of shapes on the canvas. Sometimes I extend that by blocking in the major tonal shapes, essentially making a two value (background and blue) painting. This gives a good idea of the final tonal map of the painting. From there on I use neat paint from the tube. I usually use just three primary colours plus white, setting out as much of each colour as you might use of toothpaste on a toothbrush. From there I mix colours as required. Sometimes I mix with the palette knife if I want a quantity of one colour, for example for a sky. In fact even a blue sky might have 4 or more colour variations, each mixed with the palette knife ahead of time. If I want smaller quantities and variations of colour I find it is quicker to mix with the brush. If the paint is too stiff I add a little Liquin, just enough to make it easier to work but not enough to make the paint runny. It might be about 10% of the paint quantity. Small paintings are usually completed in one session. While I am painting I am too close to the work emotionally and cannot make an objective judgement of it. I then assess it the following day to see if any changes need to be made. The fast drying oils allow me to make corrections or repaint sections immediately. I usually paint the edges of the painting later, because it is very difficult to get a wet painting home with every surface wet and trying to spead itself around the car. The final step is to varnish the painting to unify the gloss level of the whole painting.