I think my oils have come light years since July although I’ve not posted them until now (and in fact I am waiting for two of them to dry so I can take pictures). There are a few reasons for that, one is just practice, but also using better and bigger canvas board and materials also plays a big part.
I was using the cheap Loxley canvas board after my first oil on a Pebeo board that was a success…and I as a result I got to compare the two. I’ve recently switched back to Pebeo for this painting and worked with Winsor and Newton canvas board after and saw that the colours seem to be fading or being absorbed into the Loxley canvas/board (badly primed?). And a bigger crime – those cheap boards warp…
It was just easier to find A3 in that size than other makes that insist on being pre-metric (Inches? I mean really?). Reason for the A3 limit was my Tuff Box was A3, but I worked out how to carry bigger sizes of board with them mostly intact.
So hence this work is my biggest landscape to date – 35x55cm. I have settled on the slightly smaller 14×18″ / 35x45cm since as the biggest as this wouldn’t fit in my carrier properly, and I still have some 12″x16″ 30x40cm boards that are slightly too large for my Tuff Box. (I say ‘carrier’ but it’s not as posh as one of those expensive made ones – at some point I will reveal my Cheap-As (or Ass?) Oil Carrying System. It is very Heath Robinson but it works).
So here is a view of the lake in Home Park, with friendly swan (hold that thought) and crane…oh where is the crane? Well look to the skyline and you’ll see it 😉 I love puns like that.
It took two attempts – the first I was only happy with the sky and felt I didn’t get the bright ‘corn’ colour of the bleached grass, it really is a bright yellow-white. Annoyingly some of that got damaged and I lost some of those brush strokes but nothing major. As usual, this was using Liquin Impasto, but I quite often at the end forget and use unmixed paint which means the top layer takes ages (and I dunno if that’s a good idea re: fat over lean?).
Also I’ve started using new paint, as I’m finally depleting my old stocks of Winton and Georgian – I’m guessing that also helps, since nearly 30 year old paint is not ideal to work with!
I don’t think I used any new paints on this, but since I have gotten some fresh Mixing & Titanium White, Cerulean Blue Hue, Lemon and non-lead Chrome Yellow, Sap Green, some new Cadmium Red/Yellow paints as mentioned before and Pthalo Blue. The latter makes a massive change, as you will see in a future post.
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