A medium from my past

When I was in art school in the early 1960's we used gouache for illustrations. Recently I have seen several accomplished oil painters using gouache for plein air studies. And, my friend Kay Dewar, is having great success with it so I thought I'd give it a try.

After a fair amount of searching in my studio, I found the 5-tube M. Graham set. White, Black, and three warm primaries and gave it a try on 4-ply rag mat using one of my small pastel studies as reference. I love that it is matte and that it doesn't have the plastic feel that acrylic has. After completion, I gave it two spray-coats of matte varnish and then a Dorland's wax medium finish. Hmmm...interesting medium.

Passage, gouache, 6x8 inches

The 40x40 canvas again

Busy days now that it is finally summer weather. Kayaking this morning, lunch with old friends today but I wanted to check in to let you know the 40x40 canvas is still in progress.

The 40 x 40 canvas

This could be a long story...I'll try to give you the short version. My artist friend, Sheila Theodoratos gifted me a 40 v 40 stretched canvas. I started an oil painting on it, it sat around drying, I lost interest in the subject. Now, I am painting oil still lifes for a Fall show and I'm eyeing that 40x40 canvas. I have oil paintings on both studio easels right now so first I had to figure out a way to attach the big canvas to my wall. That's another story; if you're interested how I did that, contact me.

 Here is the painting in progress that I'm no longer interested in. Backlit bouquet on our dining room table. Today I drew an X through the painting with a pastel pencil to help me layout the new composition, combined two reference photos in PhotoShop Elements, moved my Alla Prima Pochade next to the painting and began to paint again.

Using a hand-held plastic palette that came with my Soltek easel and a big brush, I began blocking in the new painting of the pink Begonia that sits on my table now.

This is how it looks now after about a half hour of blocking in the new work. Stay tuned.