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litka — The Road to Shopton
by-nc-nd
Published: 2009-08-15 14:59:50 +0000 UTC; Views: 788; Favourites: 28; Downloads: 39
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Description
An ode to minimalism -- or at any rate, lowered expectations after two days of trying this and that. The funny thing is that I rather like it.That's a glimpse of Lake Carlopa in the distance.
18x24" 45x60cm acrylic on hardboard
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Comments: 10
I really enjoy your textures and the method in which you apply them; even though some of the further hills and the sky etc are all background, because of your accurate colour palette, they form the foreground and instead lend themselves to a lovely painting. The tranquility of the colour is sublime.
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There is always a bit of texture: I usually add extra medium to my brush along with the paint: strait heavy acrylic medium and/or flexible modeling medium, i.e. acrylic medium with marble dust, to get more of, and sharper detail to my brush strokes. I usually try to scrape off, or at least smooth off textures I'm painting over because they seem to get rather messy with acrylics -- more so, it seemed to me than with oils. (But then, I usually painted over oils when they were still wet and rarely went back and repainted them when dry...)
I should take a new photo of this painting, as it was a dark rainy day when I shot it so I had to use artificial lighting, and a lot of adjusting in Gimp.
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I find acrylics much messier than oils; working with turpentine - albeit smelly and nose-burning - allows a great deal of maneuverability. The problem with oil paint is that it requires infinite patience. I remember that my final piece for art took three weeks to dry. It was on the cusp of not being allowed to be sent off because it was so wet. It was something to do with the window, too; the damp air in the morning congealed itself onto my painting as it dried near the window and, once again, turned the oil wet.
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It seemed like it would take months for some of my oils to dry... especially paintings with a lot of yellows ... and I do lack patience in painting and drying. I started using acrylics just for my small pieces since I could paint them wet on wet like oils. Eventually I did two things: learned to paint bigger paintings with acrylics and realized that I liked painting smaller works -- no bigger than 18x24", 45x60cm -- so acrylics work for me. And they are less expensive ...
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Thank you for your observations. When writing my comment about this painting, I had originally planned to comment about how much trouble this painting (in it's various forms) gave me because I had features in the middle distant. (The scrap of a hill on the left was once a full sunny slope in front of the blue line of trees.) And how in the end, I just eliminated the middle distance and went back to my usual practice of having only two planes; a foreground and a background. I can't seem to make things smoothly and convincingly fade into the distance -- it may be a limit built into my style of painting, or just something I have yet to master. Time will tell, I guess. But for now, I'm sticking to just two planes.
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I have a maddening problem with foreground. The first colours to choose are always the hardest; that's why a photo reference or a real site is preferable to anything.
I find that heavy-on-light works best for me, using a greater-loaded brush the closer I get to painting the foreground. When I paint the background or the middle plane, I tend to use wash with a bit of full oil if there's something prominent there.
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I dislike traveling and the local scenery does little to excite me, so working from imagination is my best option -- and gives me a whole lot of freedom -- and by using the paints I know and like, I can start without worrying about the "right" color (I can always change it and often do).
Heavy on light makes sense, but even with oils I mostly improvised, so that with all the painting over, everything tends to get rather thick. Which is why I have my problems with the middle distances: I have no good way to distinguish it from the foreground.
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