I took this week off from work and am determined to spend lots of time in the studio with oil paints. Although I've been working on using the palette knife, today's painting was done with brushes.
I've always shied away from painting architecture because it is time consuming, and I always feel like if I can't paint it exactly, I've failed. It's hard to paint straight lines with brushes! I was struggling a bit with that, when I picked up one of my Rosemary Ivory flat brushes. I found this was a great brush for straight edges - and wished I had a few more sizes, so when I took a break, I got online and ordered a few more.
Process shots follow. I learned something after I'd used a dark purple heavy lines to sketch in my composition. I should have used a thinner brush and paint, in a medium value. It threw off my color palette and my values.
I had a hard time getting the correct temperature for the buildings.
I decided to make some piles of paint mixtures so I would have a variety. I have been studying David Curtis of the UK, and used his color choices of Ultramarine, Cerulean, Lemon Yellow, Naples yellow deep, Burnt Sienna, Cad Orange, Cad Red, and Violet (I had Cad Violet instead of Cobalt violet).
A nice variety of greys.
I worked on this painting continuously most of the day which is a long time for me, since I usually can only work on a painting for a couple hours at a time, due to working full time.
Struggling with those colors on the cottage, so wiped that out and decided to get the first layers down on the scenery first.
Then on to the cottages. Still struggled with the real colors shown in the photograph - so changed it a bit to darker colors on the buildings on the left. Had a lot of issues trying to get that building to look correct.
Got it to this stage and said I'd had enough. Way too complicated. I like more simple compositions!
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| St. Fillans Cottages, 9x12, oil on Centurion OP linen |
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