Just in case anyone wanted to see it. I didn’t change much from my photo to the painting - a little nudging and flipped upside down. It’s a beautiful barn that has been abandoned because it is close to a superfund clean up site.

Yes, these posts are listed backwards (You have to start at the bottom of the page to read them in order) but this is the next step in the barnwood picture. Easy as pie - make a thinnish white with turpentine and paint it in wherever you want it. On the darker bluer sections it will look grey, and on the yellow ochre it will look like liquid sunshine, lots of different tones, exact same white. Now wait another week. I usually have three to five paintings going for this reason.

Also, these demos are not my attempts to teach the world to paint ‘correctly’ by any means!! Just some possibilities for people who prefer to work out their compositions ahead of time and don’t mind painting slowly. My daughter refuses to work this way because it takes all the fun out of it for her; she can paint a portrait in two hours if she’s really moving. And I can paint one in six weeks.

Another way to do an underpainting.

Cover your canvas with very thinned paint - just turpentine, not medium.   If I’m doing an abstract or a very colorful painting I sometimes use cad yellow or red instead of the traditional earth colors, but this example is yellow ochre and burnt umber mixed.

Wait awhile, ten minutes to an hour, depending on the weather.  You want the paint to be workable without pooling back into nothingness.  Draw with paint directly on your canvas, working into and out of the light with rags, turps, and brushes, saving the lightest lights and darkest darks for much later.  This kind of underpainting is fun because it is more immediate and you might be willing to play a little more than with a pre-drawn underpainting, but either one is easily erased with a turpentine wash if you don’t like the results . Just don’t wait more than a day (half a day if it’s ninety in the shade). And you can work on it, walk away, come back, putter all day. Just keep the paint thin.
 

And then when you’re happy you want to let it dry for a week.  You don’t want to make mud with the next layer and oil paint is never as dry as it looks.
This is the photo I’m working from. Yes, it’s a photo.  I took it and  I know how to use it! The field is three minutes drive from my house so I can see it in person as often as I wish, full of bugs and out in the middle of nowhere despite its accessibility, and too far away from my microwave and CD player.  Despite what many painters believe, that a photo renders a scene static and unchangeable, I find that it is easier for me to mentally manipulate a photo than the real thing.  A real field is too detailed and overwhelming.

One way to paint with underpainting.

Draw with pencil on your canvas. The turpentine will soften the lines. Fill in with burnt umber and/or siena, using rags and brushes. Wipe to get soft lights, brush on turps and then dab to get strong lights, and add paint to get darks. Go for texture if you want it, don’t go for the lightest lights and darkest darks yet. Let dry for a week.

Go in with ultramarine blue and yellow ochre to get warm and cold. Wait another week.

Those coil-y things look like they work, but I use a cheaper method.

Eat lots of salsa, or get stubby wide-mouth jars from somewhere else. Pour your dirty turps in a jar, and two to four days later you will be able to pour out almost clean solvent with a nice mud layer that stays on the bottom that you can wipe out with paper towels — wearing gloves! If you’re like me and you paint often, you just need more jars so that one batch will always be ready. Oil paint is heavy and sinks easily if you keep the jars where they won’t get bumped. If your turps are really filthy, you can pour the semi-cleaned stuff into another jar after day four, and then let the new jar sit for a few days. Gravity will eventually win.

Just remember to put the lids on well and keep it in a very safe place - this stuff evaporates quickly and burns like gasoline and is death to pets and people too, so heads up. Putting something this dangerous in an easy-open jar carries lots of responsibility!!!
Since I like to always have clean solvent, I use baby food jars for painting turps and dump out the old stuff often in the course of a session into waiting salsa jars, using another salsa jar for brush-cleaning turps. My paint stand looks like I should be canning very small vegetables. When the jars themselves get filthy, they are practically free to replace.

Get vinyl gloves and wear them to paint. If you get the thin kind (latex if you want), you can easily pull them off inside out so your hands stay clean, and then you can do exciting stuff like answer the phone/get a cup of tea/do a little finger painting/not poison yourself through your skin. Where I live, the best and cheapest are at the Medicine Shoppe.

Don’t snack in your studio, or if you’re like me and you’re going to do it anyway, take off your gloves, go way over to the other side of the room where you don’t paint and drink from your covered travel mug while checking out how your work looks from a distance. Individually wrapped junk food (granola bars, etc.) or at least covered food, is better than stuff sitting out in the air. Because let’s face it, even if you try to paint in the neatest manner possible, oil paint gets everywhere.

Masks are good because all of this stuff can be inhaled but I haven’t found one that doesn’t steam up my glasses. At least wear one when you’re using a spatter technique.

Love,

Mom

I finally posted your comments!!! (Because Forrest came home and showed me how to do it.)

I reread the blog so far and it makes me sound like some kind of crazed Art Fan.  Remember that book ‘Math Curse’ with the line “Almost anything can be a Math problem…”?  I guess I get a little like that when I’m talking about painting.  Good thing I’m usually in the studio away from innocent bystanders.

Yes, this is my lesson to me, since this site is linked to nobody. (Must join Art Guild soon.)

Music to paint by - not what you might think.  I once had to admit to a gallery owner –only ’cause he asked– that I had painted ‘The Annunciation’ diptych to a CD called ‘Millenium Funk Party.’  Played over and over.  Uh, he was guessing Bach.  Something like that.

It’s a mystery to me what music will go with what painting, but it helps to have lots to choose from.  So “Bow wow wow yippee yo, yippee yay” to everybody, and here’s to whatever works.

Haven’t tried this one but want to - Using multiple vantage points to construct a painting.  I’m not sure how this works.  Sketch, sketch, sketch, blend, paint?

Another painting idea that works for lots of artists, that didn’t fit into the other posts.  It’s not what to paint, more one way to see.

In my picture ‘Blue House’, the inspiration building was not acid green and the windows weren’t purple, the building was only sagging in my mind, and nothing looked exactly like it ended up except for that one brave little red curtain. I drove past that house every day on my way to work, and it looked sad and I was sad and after a month or so, it seemed likeI owned this house.  In a tiny way.
Try a painting like this, where your subject reflects the emotions on Planet You. Where else can you be so inside-your-head and out there on canvas at the same time?  I love the arts.