Pericles

Day 2 and I am experimenting with my materials, after having problems yesterday.

Initially I tried again with the same methods and although I quite like the resulting painting (furthest left) it was a bit of a pain to paint.

So next time, the first thing I changed was putting a layer of burnt sienna down and then wiping it off, in the hope that this will make my painting surface less grabby. This worked beautifully for Pericles, which is painted on linen. Then I used dark paint thinned with turps to lay down a drawing and then used paper towel and turps to lighten areas. Next I tried actually painting and soon ran into trouble. Changing to a soft brush made all the difference though and I was able to lay down a fairly solid area. However, the biggest soft brush I have is only about a cm across, so clearly I need to go shopping.

The lack of a big brush showed up even more in my next painting, The Egyptian Duo. This one is on gessoed board and I really struggled getting the paint to flow in any reasonable way. This is a shame as it is fairly easy to get boards in small sizes and generally for my other work I prefer them.

This afternoon I'm going to put a layer of paint onto a few of these boards and let them dry. Hopefully that'll help, along with bigger brushes!