Studio Notes #1

I started a painting class, Oils & Acrylics 101 at an undisclosed location and yesterday was the second class. We meet once a week, for 3 weeks we work on a still life and for the next 4 weeks we do a freestyle one. I got there early and chose a nice spot in the back corner with a couple cool objects, the camera was of obvious interest given my background and also there’s a duck!

I see opportunity for a bunch of cool colors in the reflector, and decided to challenge myself with the surrounding fabric since I know it’s a weak point of mine. I started with an orange ground wash base tone underlayer imprimatura sketch. Then I mixed a blackish sort of paint and started blocking out darker values. The wash was done with oderless mineral spirits and the dark tones are mixed with liquin and some linseed oil. All paints are Winton and it’s the starter set. More to come in the Materials section of the website. We only had about an hour this week to paint so this is as far as I got.

You can see that because I cheaped out on the canvas there is a weird texture to the wash. Hopefully it doesn’t stay through to the final piece but I might have to paint thick later on just to cover it. Looking forward to getting a lot of time next week to fix things but so far I think it’s a decent start. Here’s a close-up of the weird texture.

So since it came from a 5-pack I decided to start gessoing the other ones, to try to avoid this happening again. And one of them has a huge dent in it. So we’re down to 3. And that’s what I’ve done today.