Everyone knows how to start a painting, right? You take up your brush and begin–what’s the problem? Joking aside, if you want to create a sketch or study, that IS exactly how you start. That approach is fine until you want to create something more ambitious. If you intend to create a piece that’s large,…
Artists spend a lot of time thinking about their palettes; how many colors, which colors, how big, and so forth. My palette is too large to hold in my hand so I keep it on a cart next to the easel. The palette has to be big enough to contain my color assortment and premixed…
There is a lot of information about painting mediums on my site but if you’re new to painting, an abundance of information is the same as no information. Where to start? The good news is that you can easily have a medium that supports ambitious work and serves as a baseline for exploring other mediums…
Rublev’s new version of sun-thickened oil is much improved from its earlier offering and is good oil. This is far different from my conclusion of their first attempt at this product. Sun-thickened oil’s consistency should be similar to that of stand oil. Rublev’s first attempt produced an oil little different from regular linseed oil. With…
The hand clamps I use for carpentry are versatile. Here, I’ve used one to attach a palette to my easel. My big palette, the one that spills over my paint cabinet, is movable but when I work on a big canvas, like this one, it can be a tight fit. My big palette has space…
I bought a brush set from Fuumuui: 8-piece kolinsky sable watercolor brushes. This is a tremendous bargain at $21.99 on Amazon. I used the brushes on one of my oil paintings and they performed passably much to my surprise. I expect they’ll fall apart quickly under the abuse of oil painting with its strong solvents.…
I take back all the nice things I said about titanium white. I was never a fan of titanium white but after trying some of Michael Hading’s versions of the color, warm white and unbleached white, I decided to give it another chance. My preferred white, flake white, is orders of magnitude more expensive than…
I keep my oils in two cabinets. Here is the red drawer. I hate running out of things while I work–it’s a mania. Painting is like taking a journey and I don’t want the journey to end prematurely. That’s one reason I have a lot of paint. I also test and review brands, brands that…