Painting
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Warm and Cool Blues – Which are Which?
Recently I was tasked with a commission to do for a large room that was north facing and had a bit of a dark feel to it. I wanted to use blues colours in the painting, and to add some warmth, I wanted to use warm blues. Little did I know the conflict I would find when looking to confirm my thoughts on what actually were warm blues! For me, I thought that blues that sided more towards the turquoise or cerulean end of the spectrum would be warmer than those that sided towards ultramarine and purple type blues. That was just my feeling. However, there are others that think…
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Step by Step Textured Painting
So following on from my last post about using resin in my paintings I realised that I had actually meant to document the process of creating the painting shown in that article. So I put together all of the images I took during the creation process and have made them into a step by step video of how I did it which I thought might be of interest to some. For future paintings I have just got myself a new video camera so hopefully I will be able to do some better videos (although if my first attempt is anything to go by this may not actually work out so…
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Paint it Yourself – Red Abstract
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What Makes a Good Painting?
This is more of a rhetorical question or a throwing about of ideas with anyone else welcome to pitch in, but I find sometimes writing about things brings out more ideas myself in what I can do in future. So, what makes a good painting? I have been thinking about this after I got an email from someone who had seen my work online and who asked me a couple of questions about it that made me think a bit. Most weeks I have a 2 hour drive to do and in that time I tend to think about a lot of stuff and this is one of the things…
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10 Things You Can Add to Texture
This month I have had my studio open as part of the local open studios event and during that time I have been doing some demonstrations on some textured canvases. As part of these demonstrations I have been including some additional elements to the texture to demonstrate different techniques. So as well as just using texture on its own, you can also add things to the texture to make different patterns on the canvas or board and I thought I would share some of my ideas here. So here are 10 things that you can add to your texture mix to give you some different effects: 1.String – I generally use…
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Step by Step Textured Painting
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When is a Painting Finished?
I have been thinking about this post for a while but I have been asking myself the question – when is a painting finished? – for quite a while! It first started when I began to paint semi-professionally in about 2004 when a friend of mine asked if I would like a professional artist friend of hers to come and see my paintings and give me some advice. This was at a point when I had just put together a set of around 10 abstract oil paintings. Many of these paintings had only one coat of paint but I was happy with the finished products. The artist who saw them…
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Creating a Textured Abstract Painting
Ok so I have finished the video of the creation of a new painting for my lounge. Obviously I couldn’t video every minute of creating the painting as the video would have been too long! Often I spent time just painting over and over to get the right effect. For me the key here is layers of paint, the more layers the better, until you feel like it is finished. The other key point is not to add any colour neat (apart from white), always try and partially mix it with another colour. This is the finished result, it is similar in style to the header image on this website:…
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New Paintings with Heavy Texture
These last couple of weeks I have been working on a new set of paintings that have some really heavy texture on them. I used the stucco and PVA mixture but I had a tub of slightly old stucco that was starting to get a bit dry at the edges. However, I made the most of this by using the dried up pieces as big chunks in the paintings. The paintings are based on some images that I have screenshotted from Google Earth. Nothing works better in my mind than using natural colours that you see in everyday nature. Ok so I tweaked them a bit and they are supposed…
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Step by Step Textured Painting
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Texturing Over Old Paintings
So with my texture mix you can reuse old paintings that no longer work for you. You can use gesso to do this too, particularly with acrylic paintings. But if you have oil paintings that have dried out completely (I’m talking years) then it is pretty safe to put a good layer of texture over the top before repainting. I hate wasting canvases but if something doesn’t sell or I am just not happy with it then it has to go!
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Step by Step Textured Painting
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New Paintings for Exhibition
So I have 4 paintings going into an exhibition starting today and I thought I would share a few pictures as three of them involve plenty of texture and each one has a different type of texture under it. They are all abstract paintings as per my usual style. Painting 1 is similar to two I did for the same exhibition last year – marked off segments with different patterns in each piece of texture adding to the depth of the painting. I used my usual mixture of stucco and pva on the base of the painting, covering the whole canvas, then marking off the sections reasonably quickly and adding…
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Cheap Canvases in the UK
If you are an artist working in the UK and you paint on canvas, then no doubt you try and find the best priced canvases at the best quality like I do. My preferred canvases are Winsor & Newton with Daler Rowney coming a close second. I find the Winsor & Newton box canvases are great to work with and the paint goes on well without any kind of what I would call ‘oiling’ of the surface, stopping the paint adhering properly which you can get with inferior canvases.