Planning a Painting: Edges and Padding

My first stage in planning a painting is staring at a rectangle for a while. Usually, this is in a sketch book, and then I cover it with marks. What I am doing is working out where bits of the

Buying Frames in Bulk

Over the weekend, there was a sale of frames from Frameworks, made by John Caldwell. A frame is not usually part of my commissioning process, because different clients have different styles and like to do their own framing. At the

A Look At: Kyle Thomas, Delft Bottle

Or, what I bought on my holidays At Christmas, I bought myself an art work by Kyle Thomas, an American artist. He has a loose style of painting, and I wanted to see this one up close. I felt I

Still Life, Roses and Reflections: Day 4

Today I hoped to get the stems and leaves moulded, on the first layer. After a bit of colour selection I came up with a mix that was largely opaque for the leaves, meaning that the top layer will almost

Personal Critique: Mangling Holiday Pictures – Part 4

This is not, strictly speaking, a holiday picture. However, it is from the same artist, so it comes in by the door marked ‘holiday’ and gets treated as such. It’s a portrait. I’m good at portraits. I know exactly how

Watercolour Hedgehog

For a client, I spent many hours learning how to paint a hedgehog that looked like a hedgehog but was also cute, and looked like a particular pet hedgehog. From this I learned that oil painting is not always the

Still Life, Roses and Reflections: Day 3

I spent the next day of painting starting to block in the colours. Most of this will not be visible, but it deepens the paint colours for the top layer, and lets me experiment. The first colour, and the most