Newbury Street

Here’s a recent paint­ing; I thought I might pro­vide some detail on how it was made.

This is “New­bury Street,” oil on panel, 20 × 20”. Many artists shy away from the square pic­ture for­mat, because it can be hard to achieve a dynamic com­po­si­tion within such a sta­ble frame. I worked on over­com­ing that within a sim­ple “bulls­eye” com­po­si­tion with a bit of ten­sion between the jacket and its shadow. I think I suc­ceeded fairly well with that.

The panel, which I had primed with lead white, had been cur­ing for more than six months. Dif­fer­ent sources sug­gest dif­fer­ent amounts of time to let an oil ground cure; any­where from a cou­ple of weeks to sev­eral months. I can say that this well-cured sur­face was excel­lent to work on.

Click on a thumb­nail to see the full-sized image.

I started with an under­paint­ing using a mix­ture of raw umber mixed with a small amount of Stu­dio Prod­ucts Tus­can red (a bright iron oxide pig­ment). Unusu­ally for me, I used the wipe­out tech­nique for the under­paint­ing. I did that by smear­ing on a bunch of thinned paint in any given area, then wip­ing it back. I used a mix­ture of min­eral spir­its and lin­seed oil, with a bit of turps. Then I used a bris­tle bright brush to wipe the paint back. A bright is good for this because the short bris­tles allow for easy scrub­bing. The idea is to wipe the paint away, let­ting the white ground show through in the lights and let­ting the paint stay thick in the darks.

Nor­mally, I avoid the wipe out tech­nique because I don’t think that thin­ning paint down a lot is a good idea—it can gen­er­ate a paint layer that is not prop­erly bound in the oil vehi­cle. How­ever, because the oil primed sur­face was smooth and not absorbent, I found that I only needed to thin the paint down just a bit in order to use the wipe out method effec­tively. It allowed me to eas­ily get the struc­ture of the paint­ing down quickly and eas­ily, and to cor­rect errors eas­ily using a rag dipped in thin­ner. Because there was some lin­seed oil in the thin­ner, the final result was a sur­face that was clearly well-bound, as I could not eas­ily scratch it with a fin­ger­nail or rub any pig­ment off.

Once that was dry (within a day, due to the sicca­tive prop­er­ties of the raw umber), I painted in the back­ground and shadow. That took a few days to dry. Then I applied a very thin layer of Stu­dio Prod­ucts glaz­ing medium to the sur­face of the paint­ing and began work­ing my way over the paint­ing, attempt­ing to paint some­thing close to the final effect in each area before mov­ing on to the next. That took sev­eral paint­ing sessions.