Painting Points, Part 6: Overview

April 24th, 2012

Relax for a bit and have an orange! We’ve now covered half the essential kit, so let’s pause and take status of the information so far:

Coming up are a batch of posts that complete The Setup, including palette, painting knife, and colour picker tips, and move into some amazing aspects of mixing every single damn colour out there – from the barest minimum of base colours.

Buying options

All the images in this series are from my current exhibition, and are for sale.

  • Original, framed paintings
  • Signed and numbered artprints (Giclée)

–
Please contact the gallery to purchase:
Email Gallerie Rasmus
Phone (+45) 65 91 88 33.

I hope you are enjoying this series as much as I am, and look forward to sharing the upcoming batch of essential, not easily obtainable, tips and information.

Best —SW

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Dilemmas

April 16th, 2012


The scout organisation FDF asked me to illustrate a quartet of biblical tales from the New Testament. The theme was dilemmas, which is interesting no matter what your belief. Above, Jesus heals a sick woman on the sabbat day, enraging the pharisees.

Left: Lepers were abhorred. Jesus committed the gravest trespass by going to them with compassion.

Right: An adulterous woman was to be stoned. Jesus goes to the murderous crowd, and asks that he who is without sin throw the first stone.

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Painting Points, Part 5: Brushes

April 13th, 2012

Brushes are simple technology.

Paint is collected in the hairs, and applied to the canvas or board by the force of the painter’s hand on the handle.

ANATOMY
The belly and tip of the brush may be viewed as a thick forest of hairs, where liquid paint is held, to be squeezed out by the force of the brush against the canvas or board.

The brush’s capacity for storing paint is determined by the belly; the shape of the tip and overall length of the hairs determine the shape of marks, and springiness of the brush.

TYPES
Disregard the exotic types, such as fan, mop, and cat tongue, until you really know your way around the 3 basic types. You could paint a life’s work with a set of flats and some rounds.

Personal preference applies; I much prefer the solidity and angular marks of a flat brush, while my studio neighbor may like the flowing strokes of a tapered filbert.

NATURAL OR SYNTHETIC
The hairs may be synthetic or natural.

Stay away from the super-cheap hog’s bristle brushes, as these will frustrate you.

Same advice goes for high-end sable or mongoose brushes; they offer value mostly to the accomplished painter, who needs the last touch of springiness.

Your workhorse brushes should be a nice set of synthetics.

Over time, paint works its way up into the brush’s ferrule by capillary action. The paint sits in the ferrule, evades cleaning, and dries. This dry paint puts a force on the hairs, forcing them apart, gradually making the brush ragged and less precise. Stray outer hairs may be snipped with scissors, but at a point, the brush needs to go.

Remember, I urged you to get an affordable workhorse set? Replace ragged brushes, and you won’t get frustrated.

CLEANING
As we’re using water-mixable oils in this series, cleaning is simple.

To keep your brushes healthy for as long as possible, clean them in this way:

Add a drop of dish-washing liquid to the brush. Grip the handle with one hand, the hairs with the other, and gently work the hairs collectively round in figure-eights under the tap, until the brush is no longer emitting paint.

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Painting Points, Part 4: Water

April 13th, 2012

Water. Duh.

If you’re using water-mixable oil paints, as I have suggested you do, a jar of clean tap water should be sitting on your work surface.

Use your go-to jar for cleaning lightly soiled brushes. A brush containing a large amount of paint – especially if it is of an opposite colour to the one you wish to use next – should be cleaned under the tap.

OPAQUE VS. TRANSLUCENT
Oil paints are in their nature opaque – which means that they are put down on the canvas or board in a solid coat. Light reflects off the surface of the paint. This is the opposite of water colours, where light passes twice through the translucent paint, relecting off the underlying paper.

What has this got to do with water?

Water will obviously thin your water-mixable oil paints to a more flowing state, but should be used sparingly, as it dilutes the pigments, putting down a much thinner mix.

CRACKING
Artists accustomed to water colours will be drawn to doing this. This would be an error, as oils dry in an unique way, shifting slightly during the polymerization which hardens the paint. A water-thinned wash on top of a heavier layer will be pulled apart with a myriad cracks by the movement of the lower layer’s hardening.

Glazes or washes of oil paints can certainly be obtained, and are both a wonderful effect, and a central pillar of academic painting – the Flemish masters, to take one example, used a rigorous technique of 7 layers of paint for their vibrant portraits.

To glaze, you will need a glazing medium, which both thins the pigment, and provides a flexible carrier, so no cracking will occur.

No painting medium is required for simple, direct oil painting, and it is a mistake to use complicated mixtures or techniques … [but] mediums are necessary in thin, transparent glazing and in thin paints in general to manipulate and control them successfully.
— Ralph Mayer, The Painter’s Craft, 1948

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Painting Points, Part 3: Oils

April 11th, 2012

I use and recommend water mixable oil colours; the “Artisan” range made by Winsor & Newton is very satisfying to work with. I am not being paid to say this.

Why water mixable?

Traditional oil paints are made from finely ground pigments, suspended in an oil, usually linseed. Linseed oil is made by pressing flaxseed, and is in itself non-toxic.

My problem is with the solvents and thinners you use to work the paint.

CHOOSE YOUR POISON
To mix, thin, and clean traditional oils, two solvents are broadly used: white spirits and linseed oil.

White spirits are obviously toxic, both to touch and by inhalation. To my mind, the toxic fumes have played a large róle in putting painters into the factory-style, high-lofted studios which are miserably cold during the winter months. If you work in an environment where you or others use spirits regularly, you will quickly learn to tolerate, even forget the smell of spirits. This is basically a toxic environment, which will decrease your life span. Freezing while you work is not doing you much good either.

Linseed oil has its own, sizable problem: it self-combusts. Which means, oil-soaked rags dry by oxidation, becoming potentially hot enough to ignite. The stories are out there, and I for one do not need any other argument to never use this oil.

Enter the water-mixable oils, which are pigments suspended in a recently developed medium, that may be thinned and cleaned with tap water. They are odourless and safe; you will be able to use them in a shared studio.

“The character of the water soluble oils is very similar to oil based paints. They seem to give you excellent depth of color. You can use the same medium as you would with oils. Or you can use water, each can give you a variety of looks. The spread ability and colors remain the same.”
— Pauline Dickerson

The W&N Artisan range has a lovely texture, and the pigments are good. There are others out there, but I recommend the W&Ns.

The daily work of painting, cleaning brushes and other tools, is accomplished entirely with water.

Your artwork, on canvas or board, will lose the water in a day or two. After this, the oils “dry” like traditional oils by polymerization – reacting with oxygen, they gain inner chemical bonds, which over a period of weeks make the paint harden. Thin or thick application will obviously determine the “drying” time. Oils are traditionally regarded as bone dry after six months.

TO COME
Selecting and mixing colours is obviously the fun part. This is where we are heading, but first we need to work through the other tools of The Setup.

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Painting Points, Part 2: The Setup

April 11th, 2012

Start out organised. Be disciplined about your setup from the start, and you will be working much faster – less frustration upfront, and much better efficiency when you have worked for a while, and gained muscle memory and a feel for the tools.

This is my setup. It is right for me, being right-handed, and prefering for the moment to work on a flat surface. The components move, but not by much. Every thing is reachable, and in its expected place.

Initially, some of the tools may feel strange, so keep your setup constant. This minimizes the number of variables you are contending with.

What’s the reward?

You will experience that you start speeding up after a while.

Many traditionally schooled painters actually wore white on the job; like accomplished chefs, they had command of their tools to an extent where the inherently messy nature of the work seldom got out of hand.

The following blog posts look at the tools in sequence.

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Painting points, Part 1:

April 11th, 2012

Welcome to the PP series of enabling tips for aspiring painters.

I am an exhibiting painter, and a lifelong professional illustrator. I have illustrated for newspapers, in criminal court, editorially for magazines, and currently exhibit for a commercial gallery with multiple franchisées.

I am neither a master, nor a voice of authority. But a seasoned and practical source, if you wish to demystify and open the subject of painting.

My approach is that of an artisan: learn the basics that are proven to work, the time-tested techniques, and the rules of thumb that allow you to easily use the tools.

Techniques and tips make up the core skill-set. When you have a good feel for the basics, your adventure going forward will be richer.

“You can’t teach art. Art School in itself is a ridiculous concept.”
— Teacher at the art school I attended

“You’re entirely wrong, and your continued employment depends on you being wrong.”
— Me

This is a prickly issue with me, as my art school education took place in the 90s, when very little was taught.

The overarching educational principle during this time was that practical knowledge would limit students. Students would become copies of the instructor, and not accomplished artists. The only allowed road to mastery was free experimentation and expression.

This principle did not work in theory, even less so in practice, churning out art students with extremely loose styles, and no solid foundation to work from.

At this time, the internet was not a factor, so a route to actual knowledge was difficult. One of my friends traveled across Europe to seek out and study with a celebrated master; the master was a brilliant painter, but turned out to have no communicative skills. My friend returned after three months, empty handed.

Happily, today the system of dodgy art schools and recluse masters has been short circuited by the wealth of instructional videos available on-line.

Get on YouTube or Vimeo. Look up some names, and sample a few whose work you like. You will spot certain ways of doing things that are common for every artist painting in the style that excites you.

In this series, I will share with you what provenly works for me, and many other artists working in a representational style.

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Lilleskolerne

April 10th, 2012

Some magazine commissions are especially nice; it may be that the brief is compelling, that you are granted latitude in interpretation, or that the customer is excited and appreciative. In this case, all of the above held true. I am quite happy with the result.

The article deals with how enrollment in smaller, private schools is booming, as public schools are faced with difficult political goals, and are being beaten up in the press.

I painted some canvas for the raw background. On this layer, the line work was laid down in indian ink from a quill and brushes. Colours were added in a paint program.

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Exhibition in Grenen Kunstmuseum

April 5th, 2012

I am proud to announce that I have 11 new paintings displayed at the prestigious Grenen Kunstmuseum, situated at the very northmost point of Denmark.

The paintings deal with the tenacious charm and stoic faith of the original fishing population, which attracted the fiery, colourful Impressionist painters from Copenhagen.

The economic success of the Skagen painters gave the fishing community what it most desired: a harbour. But from the harbour followed tourism, the gaudiness and commerce of which enriched and changed Skagen for perpetuity.

This series of paintings quote Michael Ancher’s works: portraits, and half and full length figures are juxtaposed with energetic, modern elements that hint at commerce and vigorous pop culture.

The paintings are oil on board, all a pleasing 40 by 30 cm.

Signed artprints (Giclées) are also available.

Contact me (28 14 32 06) or Gallerie Rasmus (65 91 88 33) for details.

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Little Red Suitcase

November 23rd, 2011


Little Red Suitcase is online!

In collaboration with designer Allan Daastrup and the band, I proudly present the new site for this stellar avantgarde-duo:
Littleredsuitcase.com

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On a technical note, the site is hand-coded to a pixel-perfect design, and features real headline fonts – not bitmap images of text – made possible from the merciful gifts of HTML5 and CSS3.

The galleries use Lightbox, and the PDF links lead to very nicely designed documents, done bespoke for the band.

Among the photographers contributing to the site is internationally famous rock photographer, Søren Solkær Starbird, with some very cool images.

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