Spring Growth

I’m was still playing around with Liquin. Its good points (handling, quick drying, etc.) make it indispensable. Here I applied a layer of Liquin to the canvas before I applied the paint. It was awful. It felt like I was using ‘old fashioned’ Linseed Oil. Sloppy, greasy, more paint lifting onto the brush than coming off it. The sky bit was OK until I was trying to put the fine branches of the trees onto the wet paint of the sky layer. The video below tells the whole story.

I like ‘one session’ paintings. I hate having to wait for a painting to dry before I can finish it. The way I am working at the moment I have no choice, I will have to paint smaller pictures, or paintings which take less than 2 hours to complete. As I write this I am looking at the next painting I completed yesterday and am thinking of the next one, and I think this is good. Recently, I got bogged down in the issues with Liquin and paintings drying as I was working. This is a problem beginners suffer from a lot, ie getting bogged down in a painting, which goes from bad to worse, or spending so long in a painting session that their judgement is impaired and the painting seems like its going from bad to worse. One session painting is not everyone’s ‘cup of tea’, but exhaustion and fatigue effects everyone.