Click Here for Purchase InformationHaving been painting small daily paintings for a while. Now it is time to do some serious large pieces. I did this 18” x 24” over the weekend. You know I have been concentrating on painting leaves. This one starts to show a real progress. Painting large feels so different from painting small ones, especially the second day. I paint without using any medium. I have started to see issues with this approach. On the second day, my dark colors have dried quite a bit. They looked mat and lose the dark value. The paint surface is so sticky and difficult to get the effect I wanted. If you have experiences of finishing a painting in multiple days, I appreciate if you can share some of your tips.
14 comments:
The complex jumble of leaves is very rich and varied and yet so legible. I especially appreciate that one horizontal leaf, near to the viewer and seen from on edge, that reaches out to us like an outstretched open hand.
This is a beauty! Love everything about it!
Lovely, as always, Qiang. Would like to know why you are choosing not to use medium (I assume by that you mean that you are not coating your canvas with refined linseed oil like you did in your workshop.)
Hey Qiang; Really stunning work as always. Thanks so much for sharing it. I have the same problem sometimes with the darks looking "Mat" really frustrating. You can at least partly solve the problem by going over them with retouch varnish. The color has sunken into the canvas, and the retouch revitalizes them again. I hope this helps.
Best;
Chris
Absolutely gorgeous.
What a gorgeous painting, indeed! Glad to see you working large, because it's such a beautiful result.
If I'm not using medium, I like to paint with Rembrandt brand oils; they're loose enough not to need medium. Expensive, but really nice paints with a good pigment load. When I use medium, I use Resngel by Weber. It's good for impasto and leaves a nice sheen. It's nontoxic and nonflammable, too.
Sublime travail où la magie de l'artiste opère... harmonie de couleurs vous m'enchantez...
Fabulous work, I love the use of soft and hard edges. It is so rich in so many ways!
Hi Qiang. Foster Caddell always sprayed retouch varnish before resuming work. He was just like you in that he hated painting medium, and usually painted his alla prima paintings around 24x30 in. So I'm with Chris - give that a try.
Very nice work, by the way.
Your work is so incredible. I love the looseness of your backgrounds and how your main focus captures so much rich detail. Awesome!
gorgeous! those leaves are really alive - & i really like the way the fruit, leaves, & objects are so interconnected!
i use m.graham paints w/out any medium - they stay what feels like fully wet for 3-4 days (longer if it's cool &/or rainy out, or i've put it on heavily). then the thin parts do get tacky. if i have to paint over tacky areas, i use a heavier load of paint on the brush & lay it down thicker, then work it for the consistency i want. i also don't like a matte look & can't use retouch varnish. my solution (that's worked so far!) has been to tone the canvas w/ a relatively thin layer of oil paint (lately i'm using a combo of titanium white, raw sienna, and cad yellow - before that i used straight cad yellow light), letting it dry completely before i begin.
thanks for sharing this lively, lovely painting!
I use water soluble oils and a medium to slow the drying... But I still have the same problem with certain colors drying too fast. I LOVE LOVE LOVE seeing your larger more ambitious paintings!! Seems like I always ask for more when I come to your blog, haha, please forgive me if it's a little rude. But MORE, please.
Try using a drop of 100% clove oil on each paint pile or just the ones that dry out fast like browns. it slows the drying time down and allows for working in multiple sessions.
Awesome paintings!
If you don't want to use medium, you can slow the drying by keeping the painting in a cold area. Refrigerator works. So does a cold, damn basement.
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