Learning from paint

I’m a hobby artist. I experiment with a variety of different media, but I often come back to oil paint. I tried something different this week. 

Usually when I paint with oils, I start with the darkest colours and work my way up to the lighter ones (old school chiaroscuro). But I’d seen some cool videos with acrylic painting where they put a lot of colors on the canvas and mixed as they went. That kind of works for oils, but I discovered that I quickly had too.much.paint on the canvas and it would never dry. So I scraped a layer of not-dry paint with a palette knife, which surprisingly left a really nice baseline of color to build off of. 

I also had to wait, because oil takes time. But the waiting gave me time to really look at the reference, the layers, the tones. I’m pleased with how it’s shaping up. Not going to hang in the Louvre, and that’s okay.

Things I learned from the process

• Do not just slather a bunch of paint on the canvas.
• Take a hard look at the colors in the original.
• Nothing is just one color.
• Start with colors side by side in their areas. Blend the edges carefully.
• Photos (references) really do show lines around objects. Who knew?