Enyaw
namuh
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9 x 12 inches .. oil on paper .. alla prima .. painted Nov 8/24 ..
Donna was questioning me as to how I work so here is how I proceeded today ..
Firstly, I use more brush than knife these days and I do use a few weird brush techniques starting with how I manipulate my brushes. Here are a few tools of my studio. Hair thinning scissors {Amazon} to trim brushes as well as a knife. Dollar store jar for air tight storage of left over paint and the drying rack for wet paintings. As well, my well used, cut and beat up brushes. They leave better tracks.
I hold the brush on the end of the long handle as well. It makes rolling the brush or flopping it around much simpler.I use photo manipulation as well by blending different photos into a new photo. I paint little abstracts at times with left over paint from a painting session and then resize them to fit the size of my photo of my flowers. I then blend the two together as below.
I never try to paint my reference image exactly because I couldn't and I only want a reference so I have a foundation to build on when I paint.
Sometimes I sketch before applying paint but I don't draw details. Too lazy for that and everything is under paint when done so I do a line sketch quickly denoting space more than anything else. So next I squeeze out paint and put a blob of cold wax with each piece almost a 1 to 1 ratio of paint and wax. I mix these together and I then add a mother color to mute my original colors and I use the mute for my block in. A shot of the palette after the block in is done.
This is where the painting begins. I go back to the original colors and I actually add a color if needed in this case I added a magenta as I wanted some purple. So anyway when done the palette looks like this and I scrape up color and make new colors or keep the originals depending. I put my brushes in a dollar store small paint tray. I don't clean them I leave the paint in them as it keeps them workable as long as I don't go for days without painting. If I do I soak them in Sunflower oil and then wipe them to remove the paint.
Not the best piece I've done. Very hard to concentrate on painting when trying to document something.
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