http://www.painters-online.co.uk artistMarch 2021 29
PRACTICAL
be applied thickly if that’s your style of
painting. If you don’t follow this rule,
the paint could crack and even flake off
at a later date.
Wet-on-wet
This direct painting technique is, in
essence, a variation of painting alla
prima and can be quite an expressive
way of painting. Essentially it involves
painting layers of wet paint directly
into previous layers of wet paint and,
more often than not, is completed in
a single session. I find this approach
useful when I’m painting on location
and need to complete it in one sitting.
However, caution is needed when
using this technique; if you overwork
it by laying too much paint on initially,
you can easily end up with a canvas of
muddy colours as they mix together.
Vincent van Gogh used this direct
painting method to great effect and
there’s nothing remotely muddy about
his wonderfully vibrant colours! You
do tend to achieve a certain freshness
and spontaneity to your painting when
working in this way, which can only be a
positive!
Wet-on-dry
This technique is primarily suited to
studio painting as it involves periods
of drying time between layers. This is
my normal working method when I’m
working indoors, and I find it useful to
have at least a couple of paintings in
progress at any one time. Wet-on-dry
allows for more time to plan and adjust
colour and tonal balance, or even make
small adjustments to the composition
as you proceed. It’s a useful technique,
particularly if you’re a relative
newcomer to oil painting, as there is
no pressure to complete a painting in
one session. For the more experienced
artist who likes to take their paintings
a stage further, you do need a dry layer
to work on if you’re applying glazes or
scumbling – two useful techniques that
I’ll be discussing next month.Painting in layers
In the studio I tend to build up a
painting using thin layers in the early
stages and I don’t necessarily wait for
each stage to dry completely before
working on top of it. I generally start off
by covering the white canvas with a thin
wash of diluted paint – often a warm
or cool neutral grey or perhaps raw
or burnt sienna. It all depends on the
mood I want to establish.
This coloured ground gives me a
degree of unity throughout the painting,
and some of this ground colour may
show through in the finished piece.
Another reason for working on a
coloured ground is that I’m able to
judge my tones more easily – I can work
up and down the tonal scale, starting
with my darkest tones up to my lightest
highlights. I like to be fairly bold at the
drawing out stage; I’m not interested in
fiddling around with detail, so I block in
those darkest masses first. Always worku A Secluded Cove, oil on board, 113/4 3 91/2in
(30 3 24cm).
The rock structures were drawn on a heavily
gessoed board, which gave me a fairly uneven
surface to start with. This was followed by
blocking in the darkest tones using just a spot
of turps to thin the paint. Heavier layers of
paint were subsequently applied with a hog
bristle brush, keeping the background quite
flat and increasing my visible brushstrokes as
I reached the foreground rocks and beach. A
small amount of Gamblin cold wax was mixed
into the final layers and a painting knife was
used to spread out some areas of thick paint
on the rocks
from dark to light and over the whole
canvas, rather than trying to complete
any single area – that’s not the way to
create a successful and well-balanced
painting.
Adopting the same principles as the
fat-over-lean technique, I start by using
paint thinned with refined turpentine,
gradually adding a small amount of
linseed oil as I progress. A note here
about using colour: tone and colour are
two different things – obvious perhaps,
but it’s worth clarifying. Tone in the
context of a painting is how light or dark
a colour is, rather than the actual colour.
Paintings need good tonal balance
to be successful, an overly saturated
painting of colour doesn’t often
work (I’m not referring to the Fauvist
movement here, of course). You can
see how I’ve put these techniques into
practice in my demonstration My Studio
Table (pages 30-31).Impasto
This is a really creative and expressive
technique that’s so well suited to the