Friday, January 27, 2006

Planet

I must say that the month of January was not a very prolific one, art-wise. I had to go back to my full time work schedule for this month, which eliminated one day a week that is normally dedicated to art work. In addition a Letterpress class I'm taking at Foothill College also keeps me very busy. Well, starting next week I will have my regular art days again and then I hope I'll be able to post new stuff more regularly.

In the meantime, here is a piece I finished actually a few weeks ago already. The more I look at it, the more it reminds me of a planet (in the background) so maybe that will eventually become the title. Any other suggestions, anybody? This piece is again done on burlap with my hand-ground oil paints. I realize I never posted the format for the pieces on this blog, so here it is: 20"x24".

Thursday, January 19, 2006

A silver moon

Ooops - no posting for more than 10 days? That's not good. I actually have done some art work in the meantime, but I never got around to post any of it. So here is one of my recent pieces, again oil on burlap and with my own paints. I haven't decided on the title yet. Most likely I'll be super creative and call it "Silver Moon"...

There are two things that are different on this one. First of all I painted it on acrylic gesso, where my other oil on burlap pieces were all primed with rabbit skin glue and chalk and all the good old-fashioned stuff. So this time it's just regular gesso, aside from the fact that I used black gesso. But more significantly, I used a different medium. Normally I paint with a mixture of linseed oil, turpentine and a bit of dammar. I am trying to get away from using so much turpentine and started to experiment with a couple commercial media. I decided to give Gamblin Galkyd Lite a try (I also tried Gamblin Cold Wax, Winson&Newton Liquin and a few others). Essentially I found most worked pretty well but took some getting used to when changing from the home-made medium. Eventially I decided to stick with Galkyd lite for now.

It works well for this style of painting I noticed. And it dries sooo much faster it's amazing. I'm also starting to work on a few pieces that I paint on board (see the priming experiments I wrote about earlier) and there the Galkyd appears to work really well too. I think I should be able to paint layers just 2 days apart, which is shorter than I actually have time to work on the pieces ;)

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Woof Woof

Here is a grisaille painting (a painting using only gray scale), done in oil that I finished in early december already. But as it was meant as a christmas present, I didn't want to post it anywhere before :) So here it is: I give you Nikita in half her glory with a seal watching suspiciously in the background.

As is probably quite obvious from my web site and the blog I rarely do portraits and this was the first time I tried an animal portrait. It's hard and I'm very happy it turned out so well, especially as it was planned as a present!