Painting: Untitled
I've been working on a new painting. It's been awhile since I've been inspired to do something but I saw a Monet in the window of a bookstore and decided I wanted to do flowers. Cherry blossoms rather than his lilies and in a brighter turquoise than the painting's pale blues. The thing with oil painting though is that it's a process. A process of layering on several shades of gray, then complimentary colors, and then redrawing the objects in charcoal. With each layer, you add more and more paint until you're at 90/10 ratio of paint to mineral spirits.
Initially you'll have a lot of "runs" in the paint which is good because it allows the varying levels of color to mix. You can see a lot of them to on the right side of my painting. While I'm not close to being done (there's a lot of highlighting to do and well it's not turquoise :P), I kind of like where it's at. Maybe I should start on another until I'm inspired to change this one? That's the brilliance of oil. Retouch it with paint in a few weeks and it'll come back to life.
Comments
Also, I admire you for painting in oils. I tried to get a grasp on that all through college and I still don't know how people have the patience to paint with it!
ok, so i just realized i should have read comments first before asking my last (stupid) question :). acrylics are great in that it's so easy to clean up afterwards but i'm finding it super hard to achieve the transluscent qualities oil paintings have. and yes, i agree with using up all my acrylics first since the startup cost of new paints/supplies is inevitably going to set me back hundreds of dollars.
the piece is quite striking, i'm looking forward to seeing it in its final stage ... but really, when is a painting ever truly 'finished' from an artist's perspective :), right?