Oil paint can be profitably judged for either its covering strength or transparency. This comports with some well known bits of studio wisdom: “fat over lean,” and “thick lights, thin darks.” Covering colors, often called ‘body’ colors, hide everything beneath them. Transparent colors modify what is beneath them while leaving them visible. In watercolors, transparent…
Category: Shop Talk
Amusement Park series, materials, Shop Talk, Uncategorized
Winner!
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•The first painting in my Amusement Park Series, Winner!, is moving along. I finished the underpainting and moved onto the overpainting, as you can see in this photo of the canvas. Yesterday, I strecthed a 40″ x 54″ canvas for another painting intended for the series. I also prepared the stretchers and cut canvas for…
materials, Shop Talk, Uncategorized
The problem with blended commercial oil paint
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•The ideal palette consists entirely of single-pigment colors. Such an ideal palette provides artists with total control over values and tones. This is especially important for artists, like me, who use lead white. These days, even high-end brands use titanium white in their multi-pigment colors. Old Holland, for example, uses a blend of titanium white,…
Amusement Park series, Art history, Drawings, materials, Paintings, Photography, Shop Talk
Amusement park series
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•I visited Lake Erie’s preeminent amusement park, Cedar Point, five times this summer. I am using the thousands of photos that I took from these visits as reference material for my new series–Amusement Parks. I have 10 finished designs and I’ve started the drawings on several canvases. Yesterday, I finished the drawing for the first…
materials, Shop Talk, Uncategorized
Reader questions
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•materials, Reviews, Shop Talk, Uncategorized
Titanium white
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•In the past, I trolled titanium white users–zinc white users too. These whites, inferior as they are, provide the only competition for the champion of oil-paint white, lead white. Actually, it isn’t even a contest; lead white wins easily on every metric that matters: blending, body, and all-around handling. Titanium white is so unnaturally bright…
Main Street, Paintings, Shop Talk, Studio Corner, Tips and Studies
‘Liberty Avenue’ again
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•Art students frequently struggle over how to start a painting. Once started poorly, a painting is hard to correct. I’ve shared the starting stages of several of my paintings for art students struggling with starting a painting. I expected my previous post about the progress of my new painting, Liberty Avenue, to be the final…
computers, Main Street, Paintings, Shop Talk, Studio Corner, thomasparkerhudson.com
Updates
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•Yesterday I noticed that I haven’t updated my galleries for a while. So, I added two paintings that I finished last year. Here is one of them, Woman in Black-stripped Dress: Woman in Black-stripped Dress is 40″ x 54.” While working on the gallery, I noticed that the gallery plug-in, NextGen, wasn’t working properly; the…