Saturday, June 30, 2012

Floral WIP Painting in New Oils

Well, I started another oil painting this morning and got this far before deciding to do a WIP (work in progress) of it.

This is a painting of some orchids and I know the pencil drawing is a little light so hope you can see the actual flowers well enough.  As you can see, the background is pretty much finished although I may tweak it a bit later.  I'm very pleased with it so far and it was a dream to paint as blending is easy as is layering lighter colors on top of dark ones.

The only things I'm not sure about are the leaf in the bottom left corner and that stem beside it so I may take them out.  I'll wait and think about it a bit more first though.

My DH, CiCi (our Maltese) and I went to Hobby Lobby yesterday where I got some paint brushes, a nice canvas and this cradled panel with canvas texture from Ampersand.  This one happens to be 12 inches square as I knew I wanted a square format for these orchids.  I usually love Ampersand products although they're very pricey but I'm not real sure about this one.  The paint seemed to drag more on this than the canvas I used for the wave painting shown yesterday.

Which brings me to the brushes I bought - I had seen several recommendations for the Robert Simmons synthetic line which are very reasonable and I've used them before for acrylics & liked them.  However, these seem almost too soft to use with the oil paints.  Of course, it could have been the Ampersand surface instead.  Anyway, I'm reserving judgement on both for right now.

So, I'll eventually try other brushes and surfaces -  Jiminy! a painting supply addiction is almost as costly as a drug addiction!

2 comments:

Christine Perry | Graphite Art said...

Those art supplies do cost you a penny. ;-)but, what would we do without our art?

How do you like painting in oils?

Jan said...

Well, I guess I could do without new supplies but I do like to play!

Chris, I've always liked painting in oils and only gave it up when my daughter was small and got into everything. Even after she got big enough to stay out of stuff, I had already moved on to other, "safer" media! And I'm really liking the water soluble oils even more than the regular ones. Now if I can just learn to paint something decent with them!