Worked on the middle and foreground of Landscape 4. Next week I’ll finish this one. I’m going to put a significant frame around this and hang it where it will be seen even though I’ll probably like this more than anyone else will.
Worked on the clouds of Landscape 4. I’ll have to paint the dark blues of the clouds again. I love this painting and hope I don’t screw it up. It’s abstract. Almost like a UFO cloud bank. Tonight or tomorrow morning I’ll paint and maybe finish the middle and foreground.
Worked on Landscape 6 all morning. I’ll work on this one more time to improve the tree trunks, clouds just above the mountains, small bushes, grass, and rocks in the foreground, and create more depth in the hills in the middle ground.
Worked on Still Life 2. Except for tweaking and details, I could call this done. However, the red apples in the original photo I took of this setup are a much more brilliant red. As this dries over the next week I’ll look at the painting and decide if I want to repaint the red apples. After a painting dries for maybe a month it should be “oiled out”. There are many ways to do it but what it does is make the entire surface of the painting look the same. Areas of the painting sink which makes it look dry. The background will be helped by being “oiled out”. After many months of drying a painting should be varnished.
Today I finished and signed Landscape 7. I’m happy with it.
Worked on many areas of Landscape 8. None of it is finished but it’s pretty close.
I finally glazed the linen in two of the still life paintings. After this dries I’ll paint the linen highlights again and after that dries I’ll glaze it again. Might have to do this several times. The Old Masters might have 60 layers of paint, glaze, paint, glaze… The same goes for the bottles except the final stage of the bottles will be opaque highlights and the final stage of the linen will be a thin glaze of brown.
Yesterday I glued my new canvas to the 16 x 20 cradled wood panels. Turned out great. The photo is a little lesson on linear perspective. There are a couple of ways to create depth. One is linear perspective. The other is atmospheric perspective. With atmospheric perspective, colors get duller and things get fuzzier as they get farther away. If you were standing at a street corner with a stop sign right next to you and could see the stop sign on the next corner, linear perspective would make the stop sign on the next corner look smaller, and atmospheric perspective would make it a duller red and not sharply focused.
Worked on Landscape 6. Tomorrow I’ll work on the tree and bush trunks. Right now they are just a flat brown right out of the tube. There’s still work to be done on the foliage but not much.
I’ve been looking for the perfect surface to paint on, preferably a fine textured canvas or linen. Canvas is cotton. Linen is flax. A fine linen is great but very expensive. An 18″ x 42″ fine weave, oil-primed, sample piece of linen is $50. A 72″ x 18′ roll of the same linen is $660. I took a chance and ordered a 72″ x 30′ roll of triple acrylic primed fine canvas for $138. I received it last night and it’s great! $138 for 180 square feet of a fine textured canvas.
The problem with acrylic priming is it will absorb some oil out of the oil paint. Also, it’s better to paint on a surface that isn’t a bright white. I have a tub of non-absorbent, light tan acrylic primer I will paint the canvas with before starting a painting. So tomorrow I will glue two pieces of my new canvas to the two 16″ x 20″ panels on the table. Then I’ll prime the canvas with the primer in the photo below. That will be the surface I will paint on from now on. Fine canvas glued to panels and then primed with toned, non-absorbent acrylic primer.
Worked on the clouds of Landscape 4. They will need more work.
Worked on all areas of Landscape 3 the last couple of days. I finally decided on a sky for this painting. This is the first step of the sky. The white clouds will go up higher after this layer dries. The corn-covered hill in the foreground will be a challenge. The hill goes down towards the dirt road. The trick will be to paint each corn stalk in detail making them them smaller as they go down the hill.
