Saturday

New still life painting

Still life with peppers and scarf, 12" x 12" oil on canvas

I've been fooling around with this oil painting off and on for a while now. The peppers have long ago dried up, so I tried to remember what they looked like in order to touch them up. I was experimenting with Liquin medium, which does make the oil paint dry very quickly--usually overnight. That's a plus for an impatient artist like me. I had quite a bit of trouble with the background and finally decided to make it very dark after reading a book by Gregg Kreutz called "Problem Solving for Oil Painters." He had a lot of good pointers and his art is wonderful, but an especially good idea for still life (which I'll do next time around) is to light the arrangement with one light source. It simplifies the painted planes and, with the proper brushwork, background and focus, can lead to a sense of mystery in the painting, rather than a painted laundry list of assorted objects. He also gets a marvelous surface on his paintings by using not just brushes, but palette knives also.

2 comments:

marianne said...

it looks great! you might also try alkyds, which are oil paints with medium added in the tube that makes them dry in a say instead of a week. for me, acrylics dry too fast to blend, but i can't wait a week for oils, so alkyds are perfect-

Gayle Bell said...

Thanks Marianne. I've never tried alkyds, but it might be worth a go. I'm a sucker for new art supplies!