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 ;)