A new work in progress

After too long allow­ing a busy sched­ule to keep me away from paint­ing, here’s a new work in progress. It’s 16 × 12” on a hard­board panel that I prepped last fall with Stu­dio Prod­ucts’ white lead primer and have allowed to cure since then.

Want­ing to ease back into paint­ing, I wanted a sim­ple still life. I spent some time arrang­ing objects, mov­ing stuff around and draw­ing com­po­si­tional sketches in ball point pen on 3 × 5” file cards. When I was sat­is­fied with the design, I mixed a neu­tral dark with burnt umber and Williams­burg Ger­man earth (basi­cally a nat­ural Mars black). That I mixed with dif­fer­ent amounts of lead white to make sev­eral val­ues of neu­tral gray. I then blocked in the basic shapes with a 1” flat brush, using paint mixed with a lit­tle bit of turps and just a touch of lin­seed oil. Because of the smooth lead white ground, it was easy to wipe out mis­takes with a rag. The goal was to achieve a basic value struc­ture with objects placed cor­rectly and the oval of the bowl laid in cor­rectly. I smeared with a rag and my fin­gers to blur edges.

Next step was to block in the back­ground, which is a blue cloth. No details, just a base tone mixed from equal parts Doak Alger blue and Doak Fra Angelico blue, then mixed with a lot of lead white and a touch of the neu­tral gray mix­ture to cut the chroma a bit. I mixed with a lit­tle turps. Once that was laid down (the cured lead white is a plea­sure to work on), I fur­ther blurred edges.

I then went over the whole piece with a soft dry brush to knock down any ridges and get the paint as smooth as pos­si­ble. I could work into the wet paint, but I have no par­tic­u­lar alla prima fix­a­tion. So I am now let­ting it dry. Total time apply­ing paint: about an hour so far.

I may call it “Three Blackberries.”