Early Summer

The soft clouds of summer.

It is difficult to paint the softness of clouds directly as you would paint solid objects. I place the colours on the canvas first and use a clean wide filbert brush to blend by cross-hatching. I do not use a medium, just a small amount of solvent to spread the colour. I use a pipette to add the solvent, a drop at a time as I mix the colours, so I don’t add too much. This helps the blending process as the small amount of solvent evaporates leaving a ‘dryish’ layer of paint. I avoid medium because the colours would spread into each other producing a single featureless colour. The process does take a bit of practice but the final effect makes it worth it.

This painting uses only 3 colours (Cadmium Yellow, Alizarin Crimson, Cobalt Blue) plus black and white. The black and white are Alkyd Fast Drying Paints. The colours are Artist Quality Traditional Oil Colours. It is recommended to use Alkyd colours under traditional oils as they dry faster. They can be mixed together if the mixing is thorough and the paint applied in a single thin layer. Avoid having distinct layers of different paint types. If the drying rates in the upper layers are faster (as with Alkyd) than the lower layers, paint might be prone to flaking off. Thick paint, varnishing, removing varnish, cleaning etc exacerbates the problem.

There is no medium used, only White Spirits. The size is 16.5″ x 12″. This was painted in a single ‘wet on wet’ session in about 2 hours.

Here is the process. To view in realtime change setting to .25. Quality can also be set up to 1080HD.