Painting Page
Oil, watercolor, etc.

Starting a Painting Testing out Color Best Lighting Homemade Gesso Oil Painting on Paper Enlarging Drawing

Can not Draw Illusion of Depth Odor of Turpentine Photography and Painting Painting on Masonite Board Watercolor Paper Buckles

From Sketch to Painting Hanging work on Paper Overworked Watercolors Reproducing Paintings Large Easle Too Expensive

How can I hang a large work on Paper?

If float mounting in a frame is too expensive you should start by reinforcing the upper edge with a thickness or two of linen sown carefully to the back of the sheet. From there you can attach the sheet to the wall or a black back board with small wire brads, or for a high tech look install gromettes to hang from or run screws with washers through the work into the wall. For light works on paper I have simply nailed ranch molding to the wall overlapping the paper at top and bottom. I was discussing this matter with Jennifer Young and she opted to sew fabric loops to the sheet top and bottom and pass a hanging rod through these for a kind of Chinese scroll effect. If your are an ambitious sewer you could try to imitate the cloth mount used for Chinese hanging scrolls on silk.

How should I start my paintings?

-- There is a tradition called indirect painting where preparatory sketches are made and transferred by gridding (see below) or some other method to the canvas which is then painted, sometimes in ink, as a monochrome tonal griesselle. This monochrome underpainting is executed to the finest detail before being colored over with transparent and translucent washes.
-- For direct painting, so-called al prima lock in your picture with large areas of color, so called "dead color" into which details can then be selectively introduced. This gives you an opportunity to work out the proportions and color before investing too much energy into capturing the details:

1. When working detail out, the overall proportions and placements can drift where as working detail into broad blocks that are suitably proportioned helps in the development of proportions within those forms and also encourages selective detail... painting which has variety because detail is suppressed as unnecessary in some passages.
2. I tell my students that if the fire alarm went off ten minutes into class I'd want to see them all standing around the parking lot holding canvasses that have an all over finish if not a lot of detail.
3. Also, people under-estimate the degree to which colors interact... I have a simple chart demonstrating color interaction that often surprises students.

Is there a painless way to test out color schemes without ruining a canvas?
Make a drawing or tracing of the composition, get it photocopied onto the nicest paper available and do color variations with watercolor or even oil if you coat the paper with unflavored gelatin or matte acrylic medium.

What is the best lighting to paint by?

Well, diffused North light really is the best but when it comes to artificial lighting regular incandescent is very yellow and florescent is very green compared to natural light. For a time I used blue photo-flood bulbs but they don't last long and are not cheap. Then I switched to a quartz-halogen rig sold at hardware stores for working in the garage... a lot of light but they put off a lot of heat. They now sell 150 watt halogen bulbs at the supermarket that screw in to standard sockets and I use those most of the time mounted in porcelain socket clip lamps. I think most other artist's use so-called 40-60 lights, a lamp that is sold at art stores that mixes 40% florescent with 60% incandescent by having a standard socket set into a circular florescent.

I'm having a lot of trouble making the transition from drawing (which I love!) to painting. I just can't "draw" in color yet. I've tried colored pencils, pastels and watercolor. The results have been disappointingly childish looking. While my drawing looks realistic and decent. Any advice?

I would go with the watercolors... there are a number of things to try but the key is not to draw in color but to color your drawings.

• Draw in water-soluble pencil or charcoal pencil and move into painting by watercoloring these. I usually paint over drawings and pull the drawing material into my paint for shading effects. Detail or light areas where you don't want the drawing media to muck up your paint can be sealed with acrylic medium so they don't get picked-up in by the brush. Through the Renaissance paintings were done in egg tempera and/or oil over ink and wash drawings (grisaille). Modern artist tend to work over drawings done in charcoal. I get great effects in my oils on canvas by painting over drawings in grease pencil (laundry marker) or oil pastel that blend into my oils.
• Paint in watercolor or opaque watercolor on matte acetate or synthetic drafting vellum placed over your drawing. Try to keep the paint wet or juicy so your not drawing but rather "laying-in" paint. Remember to move the paint by dragging it with the brush merely touching its surface rather than forced down through the paint to the support. Mistakes can be re-wet and lifted off drafting film as well as off plate finished bristle board or other less porous papers.
• Opaque watercolors allow you to build up paint in the same manner you can with acrylics or oils but have a more organic feel than the former and dry more quickly than the latter. A substitute for opaque watercolors (sometimes called gouache or designer colors) is to add opaque chinese white in small portions to your traditional transparent watercolors. You get a really satisfying effect painting up over the lines of a drawing restated in black paint, the beauty of the line appearing between areas of color rather than on top of them.
• Try not to use the brush like a pencil. Try to paint by moving you hand with your whole arm by keeping your wrist and elbow fixed, even for fine detail work, this gets you away from the wrist based drawing motions. Remember to think in patches of color rather than lines in the beginning... start with simple coloring-in of lightly shaded drawings with color washes and move to coloring-in with solid patches of colors that are blended into each other or not according to taste.
• Try different color schemes. Learn to understand the difference between a colors hue, brightness, and intensity. Experiment with brilliant colors played off against subdued versions of their hue complements or vis versa.
• If you can't struggle through the painting and just want to color your drawings a variation on a method used by Klee goes like this:
  1. Rub a sheet of tracing paper with oil pastel.
  2. place this pastel side down on top of a sheet of paper... followed by your drawing face up... followed by another sheet of tracing paper.
  3. Trace your drawing... the effect is like using carbon paper but your original drawing is protected by the top sheet of tracing paper so it isn't injured too much and the image transferred by the lower sheet of tracing paper results in a fine-line oil pastel drawing on the bottom sheet of paper.
  4. This oil pastel drawing can be colored in with watercolor so that the oil pastel drawing is not disrupted.

It is often easier to start painting on cream, tan, brown, or gray surfaces than on stark white.

Practice, practice, practice...

How do I make old-fashioned traditional gesso?

Buy rabbit skin or dry hide glue. Mix according to instructions (usually 1 part glue to ten or twelve parts water) but rather than carefully cooking over a double boiler as suggested, just bring water to boil, remove from heat, and sprinkle in glue while stirring. Immediately add whiting until a gravy-like consistency is attained. Apply before cooling gels the mixture. It may be re-heated but never boiled. If fine whiting (powdered chalk) can not be found "athletic field marker chalk" or slacked plaster may be used. Slacked plaster is plaster that has been purposefully over stirred in the mixing so that it losses it's ability to ever set properly.

Can I use oils on paper?
Paper may be primed with gesso, unflavored gelatin, or matte acrylic medium so that you do not get oil stains and the paper is not eaten away by the paint over time. Paper has been a popular support for sketches in oil paint but museums are also full of works in oil on paper glued to board or canvas with rabbit skin glue.

How do I enlarge a preliminary drawing up on to the canvas? Traditionally the grid is used. Regular squares are drawn lightly over the study. An equal number of larger squares are drawn up on the canvas. The study is then copied square by square from the drawing onto the canvas with attention to how the shapes are arranged in each square (e.g. the curve of the cheek goes from one third into the square at the bottom to three quarters in at the top). Great fidelity can be achieved by closely copying the shapes as they appear in each square of the grid. You can also project slides of your drawing on the canvas or get your drawings photocopied onto overhead transparency film if you have access to a projector. Decent opaque projectors are extremely expensive although I've made do with the cheap children's versions which only take six by six inch original and have pretty soft focus lens and dim projection lights.

I want to do water colors but I can't draw...What do I do?

Get good 8x10 made of some of your photos, trace them and have the tracings (with a white backing paper) photocopied up onto the nicest paper possible. If the photocopies are reductions it can even make the tracings look tighter... good tracing is a skill that has to be learned and practiced just like regular drawing so practice as much as possible. The traditional way to transfer a tracing onto watercolor paper is to rub the back of the sheet with graphite or charcoal and then retrace the image with the sheet in contact with the watercolor paper... if the tracing is in pencil and you don't mind the image reversal, you can just drop it face down on the watercolor paper and retrace through the back.

How can improve the illusion of depth in my paintings?

1. Overlap - it seems obvious but overlap your far objects with your near objects.
   
2. Scale - make sure to scale properly by measuring far objects accurately against near objects.
   
3. Temperature - the color of things tend to cool as they recede in space because of the humidity of the intervening air.
   
4. Value - outside things become paler as they recede because of the veil of moisture in the intervening atmosphere, however, indoors far things tend to be relatively darker than near things because unless the foreground is back-lit it most likely captures more of the light from whatever is the light-source.
   
5. Shadow - shadow can be used to break things off from their background in depictions of shallow space or can be used to articulate perspectival recession in deep spaces (i.e. the "train-track" effect).

How can I avoid the fumes of turpentine in my small studio space?

Clean up with salad oil. The thinner salad oil brakes down the more viscous oils in the paints and permits you to clean them up with soapy water. Use only a drying oil like sunflower or safflower so that any residue will not gum up the brushes or paints. However, since you must paint "fat over lean" you can't use oil to dilute paint for the under-painting as you would when using turpentine as your solvent, instead the under-painting can be made with an egg/oil emulsion made by thoroughly mixing a more than equal volume of egg yolk into the oil paint so that it will dry quickly and can also be thinned with water.

How can I integrate photos into my paintings?
Get the best photocopies you can and apply them face down to the surface of the canvas with washable fabric glue from the local craft store. Allow the glue to dry and then wet the back of the photocopy down with water...abrade the wet paper away from the canvas with your finger tips... the image will be set into the glue which remains adhered to the canvas. I've found that "paintable" siliconized white glue sold in hardware stores for caulking showers will also work well. If you do not want the image reversed it must first be copied onto transparency film which can then in turn be copied with the image reversed.

About painting on masonite-does it have to be untempered masonite and is there a visual way to tell the difference between tempered and untempered? I have read various recommendations for priming it from acrylic gesso to white latex house paint primer. What is your opinion?

Tempered masonite has size and other additives in it which are said to impair the adhesion of paint or gesso to the board surface... tempered masonite is harder to flex and is more rigid than untempered but it isn't always easy tell. Latex house paint isn't made to last forever so acrylic gesso is a better choice. personally I can't stand painting on acrylic so I size the board with hide glue and prime with a chalk/glue gesso sanded lightly after each coat. In any case, the board should be coated with what ever primer on the back as well as front to reduce warpage due to uneven stresses.

What do I do about my watercolor paper buckling as I paint?

You have a number of options:

• Traditionally watercolor paper is stretched before use. This is done by throughly wetting each sheet with warm water and then letting them dry pinned, stapled, or taped taught to a board. Simple gummed packing tape used to be used but that is getting harder to find and a somewhat expensive plastic pressure tape that sticks to wet surface is coming into use. The edges of the paper are sacrificed when the sheet is trimmed from the board.
• More expensive than individual sheets or pads of watercolor paper are so-called watercolor tablets... these are pads of paper that are sealed on all four edges with a rubber/plastic composition. The convenience of these pads are that each sheet can be painted on directly and then cut free from the tablet.
• Some artists simply paint paper while it is actually damp and mist it carefully from the back if it starts to get too dry. I soft effect is generally evident in these works but broken hard edge effects can be achieved by using a brush loaded with thick undiluted paint.
• Paper of at least 300lb weight (that is three hundred pounds a ream) doesn't buckle much and is truly luxurious if you can afford it.
• Illustration board accepts water media and one can get truly wonderful effects painting on the smooth surface of so-called "plate finish" illustration board.
• There is one organic/synthetic fiber blend paper I know of despite the fact that it is only a relatively light 70lb weight. It is called Strathmore Aquarius II and really doesn't buckle. A possible advantage of the seventy-pound weight is that you can actually use it as a tracing paper if placed over a drawing on thin paper and traced using a light table. Light tables are for the most part over priced so I strongly recommend making your own.
• I like to paint on matte acetate, sometimes sold as "frosted drafting film" or "synthetic drafting vellum"... for display it must have an opaque paper placed behind it because of it's utter translucence. The final works are fragile sice the paint simply sits on the surface and has no fibers in to which to sink and cling.
• I've started using plastic-coated freezer paper from the "wraps" section of the grocery store. The plastic backing prevents the paper from buckling, the shiny side can be used as a disposable palette, and it is very cheap so students don't feel precious about going through it. It is translucent and can be traced through without a light table. I have students make up multiple tracings from a drawing on better paper to use as worksheets on which different color schema can be tried out. For display a sheet of more opaque white paper must be placed behind it. It is not acid free but the plastic holding it together isn't going anywhere soon, yellowing is the ultimately long-term prospect. I've run long sheets of this stuff along the walls of my kid's room, he can paint and draw on it and I don't have to worry about anything bleeding through to the wall underneath.

What can I do about my watercolors looking overworked and overly brushy? I want a more effortless look.

• The real key to watercolors is letting the water do the work. Areas can be pre-wet with clear water and colors dropped into them. Most important in watercolor painting, however, is keeping the brush from touching the paper... with practice you can drag the paint around the paper by pulling at it's top surface with the brush, the surface tension of the water will cause it to cling to a damp brush.
• Also, accomplished watercolorist do a lot of lifting off... you can pull clouds out of the sky with kleenex or paper towel. Lights can be scratched into dry paintings with an x-acto knife or even fine sand paper.
• Paint and masking-fluid can be applied with a sponge, the edge of a card, a bamboo pen or splattered on with a toothbrush. These are all special effects and should be used with restraint.
• For fine texture such as hair and grasses you can make many fine marks with a single action of the brush by fanning it's bristle out by squeezing it hard between two fingers at the ferrule where the bristles are joined to the brush handle.
• The leaves of trees and other rough texture are best achieved by stamping with organic sponges of a various finesses. Don't forget the possibilities of stamping from rubber erasers or synthetic sponges cut with an x-acto knife but be careful not to get gimmicky about it.
• Also, I have my students cut fine masks by placing masking tape on a sheet of glass or porcelain plate, cutting it finely with an x-acto and peeling of these fine shapes to use as masks. The tape can be made to not damage the paper by patting the adhesive with your finger tips before placing the tape down so that it won't damage the paper when you peel it off.

How can I share my paintings without giving up my originals?

• I used to take plexiglass, place it over my painting and trace the image by scratching with a steel drypoint stylus... I would then ink, print, and handcolor with watercolors.
• Then I started making Cannon Laser copies of my smaller works in oil and watercolor and dry mounting these to foamcore. It could be called kitchy but I've textured these things with acrylic medium brushed on or embossed with canvas. The images themselves can also be transferred directly to canvas by:
  1. coating with waterproof fabric glue
  2. applying face down on canvas while still wet
  3. and abrading the copy paper off the glue with a wet sponge once the glue has dried...
  The machine can be set to make a reverse image to take into account the reversal of the transfer. I've even used color copies made from slides... the maximum size they make without the need for tiling is 15x17 inches.
• Gauguin used to offset a couple copies off of his gouaches and watercolors by pressing them in contact with successive sheets of damp paper and pressing them by placing a board over them and sitting on it... he would then touch up the weak spots on the offset with in-painting.

I can't hang the large canvasses I'm painting on the brick or cavity walls in my studio but heavy duty easels are far too expensive...what is the alternative?

1. Pound two floor to ceiling "two-by-fours" into the masonry or studs at the top and bottom of the wall with four inch hardened fluted masonry nails... the canvasses can now be hung on three-penny nails set into the two-by-fours.
   
2. You can make an adjustable wall easel with "one-by-threes" set flat on to the wall with a quarter inch gap between them and spaced off the wall with a short horizontal rail at top and bottom... traveling top and bottom supports for the canvas maybe held to the rail by carriage bolts passing through them and the quarter inch track between the vertical rails to a fender washer and wing nut that can be tightened by reaching behind the assembly.
   
3. A free-standing easel can be made by cheaply by taking a six or eight foot wooden ladder (much cheaper than an artist's easel), duct taping a cinder block to the first rung and hanging your canvas from nails pounded into the wood of the other side of the ladder that runs straight up and down and is without rungs.

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L.C.D. (Least Common Denominator)
"Make it simple and push the content..."