The Creative Process

EDIT: For whatever reason the photos in this post have consistently come up in google searches and people seem to randomly find my blog. Please don't steal my photos! I appreciate it.

Today's post is mostly about painting process, because I've ventured back into oil painting, which is generally much more time intensive, so I don't have a finished product.

Remember when I said I have a problem with buying art supplies? Well I wasn't freaking kidding. This is about half of my art supplies (since most of it isn't even visible). Every kind of "mark making" tool you can come up with, I probably have...in multiples.

 

Seriously who the f*** needs this many paintbrushes? What was I thinking? Oh wait I wasn't... Amazingly there are no repeats in paintbrushes, with the exception of 2 detail brushes because they tend to get wrecked so easily. Oh and these are just my oil paint brushes. I have completely different ones for watercolors.

If you are venturing into painting, don't mix your brushes if you can help it. Getting acrylic and oil and other paints on the same brush can quickly deteriorate it.

As for ACTUALLY painting, I had a lot of fun mixing paints today.

Black paint you say? True, it IS black paint, but it's actually mixed from ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. In other words dark blue and brown make black!

Why mix black?

It was a trick taught to me in high school (and sadly never pointed out in college. wtf?) But it does create a "richer" black. Black paint from the tube can often go flat on a canvass in comparison with all the other colors you probably mixed. So why not mix a chromatic black? There are actually other combos that work too but I like the way this one turns out.

Similarly, mixing flesh tones is tough. Take brown, add white to taste, right? Blegh. That's for lazy artists (Yeah I'm calling you out. haha). It's actually more like this:

I usually start with a lot of white and add a little red (I actually don't have the best red for this) until you get an awful cotton candy color. Then add a little cadmium yellow and the color quickly turns to a familiar peach flesh tone, although it's pretty "cartoony" at this point.

Then a little ultramarine OR a little of the right green. I haven't heard of many people using green, but I think it results in a better Asian skin tone. Then finally add bits of yellow ochre, burnt sienna or burnt umber.

Voila, instant flesh! I've been guilty of putting paint directly on my arm to make sure the color seemed right. Not really suggested, some of this stuff is actually kind of toxic.

So what the hell was all this for?

Tada! If it seems like blobs of things you would be correct, but I need it to dry a bit before I proceed. Patience is key with oil painting.

 

This is on a piece of canvass "paper." Basically just an 18x24 piece of prepped canvass. It's just taped to a piece of newsprint to keep it from sliding and protect the table.

In other news, I definitely have paint in my hair. Yeah. I missed oil painting.