Autumn Lake

Its good to look at your paintings as a series of steps on a journey. And the best way to do this is to physically stretch them out in a chronological line and look, from one to the next, as if you are retracing your passage through time. From this perspective, patterns will be seen to emerge, some good and some you would like to change. For me it was a tendency towards dark, heavy colours and shapes which I set out to change. This is the third in this series where my objective was to raise the tone of the colours.

The colours used really don’t matter other than resisting the urge to add black to the shadow colours. In this painting the only black used was in the shadows on the trees on the left and on the boat and these were almost an afterthought to strengthen these areas.

Its a three colour painting as usual, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Umber and French Ultramarine Blue, plus white and the tiniest amount of black used unmixed in the shadows as mentioned above. The size is 16″x10″ and was painted in about 2 hours. As usual I didn’t use a medium, only a solvent (White Spirits).

Here is the painting process. See you soon.

Late Summer

A reader mentioned my excessive use of White Spirits solvent. His concern was the dulling effect on colours and the resultant weak paint layer, prone to cracking.  He gave a brief outline of his painting method and his particular attention to the ‘fat over lean’ principal. Very sound advice indeed if you paint in the strictly traditional method.

If Liquin or any Alkyd based media are used with traditional oils, adjustments have to be made to the working method. I will refer you to a recent post (here) regarding this medium.

With regard to White Spirits mixed with Linseed Oil or the other vegetable oils, this solvent does behave differently to Turpentine. The key issue is the viscosity of the two solvents. Viscosity is how ‘thick’ a liquid is.  Adding Turpentine to Linseed Oil lowers its viscosity, White Spirits lowers it much more. Traditionally prepared oil painting grounds are based on Linseed Oil / Turpentine absorption levels. Linseed Oil / White Spirits has a much lower viscosity and is drawn deeper into the ground carrying much of the Linseed Oil with it. The result is a dull, brittle paint layer liable to cracking. There is also the possibility of the canvas fibres penetrated by Linseed and this can cause other problems.

This is not all theoretical stuff as I noticed the difference when I stopped using Turpentine. I could not use many of the commercially available oil painting grounds, with White Spirits, as they appeared to be too absorbent. Switching to Alkyd Oils while using White Spirits was completely different – no ‘leeching’ of medium into the ground.

So why did I stop using Turpentine? Many years ago I gave classes in Oil Painting. While I didn’t have any problem with the vapour from Turpentine (I quite liked it in fact), many of the students did, getting headaches or skin rashes. We agreed to ban Turpentine from the classroom and use odourless thinners instead. Some time later Turpentine was classed as a toxic substance and since then I just never bothered using it. Odourless thinners is not always available here but White Spirits always seemed to be on the shelves of the art stores, so White Spirits it was.

Here is the painting of the above. See you soon.

Kellyville Lake

In a recent post I talked about the lights I use to photograph my oil paintings (here). This was about the colour of the light used and the setting on the camera (white balance) used to adjust to this light. The next issue I struggled with was the position of the lights. Oil paint is wet and glossy and when it dries the colours change so its made wet and glossy again, by oiling out. Varnishing to matt, satin or gloss takes place months after the painting dries. I video and then photograph the wet painting as I’m painting, so gloss is a big issue for me.

If I was illuminating the painting for the purpose of painting only, then its fairly simple. Place the light, or lights, at a low angle to the surface of the painting and place myself directly in front. As long as the light is not coming from my direction it will not reflect back in my direction, simple.

Introduce the camera and the same applies regarding reflected gloss on the resultant video or photograph. As myself and the camera cannot be in the same position, the solution was to paint flat on a tabletop. I’m on one side looking down and the camera is opposite me on the other side of the table, also looking down. The lights are each side at a low angle so the reflected gloss does not affect me or the camera.

I see the painting right way up, of course, but the video is upside down. The simplest way of correcting this is to invert the video in a movie editor, otherwise the camera has to be mounted upside down while making the video. The video is a little bit skewed but that’s OK for a video. The photograph taken with this arrangement is also skewed and this is corrected in Photoshop but I have to be careful that Photoshop doesn’t apply a colour profile different to the one I photographed with.

So that is it. Lights, camera, action (paint a picture). Here’s the video.

After the Rain

I’ve had a few queries about photographing paintings, or how I do it. The difficulty I’ve had from the beginning was the light. Firstly, light is ‘coloured’ depending on the source. Its referred to as Colour Temperature. When I started recording videos and photographing paintings I would adjust the settings on the camera to match the light source. For example, tungsten lighting, or fluorescent. The preset settings on the camera are fine for most cases but not precise enough for what I was doing. Tungsten light varies from bulb to bulb, as does fluorescent, and this was noticeable when the same painting was photographed in different rooms using the appropriate camera preset. The photographs were slightly different. I then used a standard white card to set the White Balance on the camera (most digital cameras allows you to this). This was a vast improvement over using the presets as the light ‘temperature’ is measured and this is used as the setting.

However, I found slight differences between the image in a video and a photographic image taken at the same time with the same settings. Its to do with the way the image was recorded, as a video or still photograph. This was very noticeable using fluorescent light. Fluorescent lights flicker on and off at a rate of about 60 times per second and this is varying from second to second. A video taken at one thirtieth of a second shutter speed, should get 2 fluorescent flashes per frame, but it can be more or less, and this will affect the exposure. Its seen as black bands moving up or down the resultant video. A still photograph, taken with a long exposure of half a second, will get approximately 30 flashes in the half second the shutter is open. But this varies from photo to photo. All this flashing really confuses the automatic exposure in the camera so every setting has to be on manual.

So the solution, I thought, was to use incandescent light, like tungsten standard bulbs. These don’t flicker but the problem was heat. The lights had to be positioned in a particular way to avoid the gloss of the wet paint (more about this in the future). As I painted and recorded in a single session of about 2 hours, the heat from the lights was unbearable.

In the end I purchased 2 fluorescent photographic lights and although the manufacturer’s instructions said to set the White Balance to 4000K, by experiment I found the correct setting for the lights was 4400K. These flicker like standard fluorescent lights but at a much higher rate. So the variations are less noticeable. Now the video of a painting looks the same as the still photograph of the same painting and all paintings photographed under exactly the same conditions have the same ‘relative’ colour balance.

Having worked through this process makes me wonder about the torturous lengths painters go through to have accurate colour matching of their subjects in paintings. The colour of natural light varies from morning to dusk, from sunshine to shade or overcast. Artificial light varies with every light source. We don’t see the difference as the ‘automatic’ adjustment in our brains masks the differences. The painting produced in ‘natural’ light and hung in a gallery under artificial light are completely different in colour and we don’t notice the difference. Furthermore, no two people see in the same way and many people are partially colour blind (especially men) and they aren’t even aware of it. So much for accurate colour matching – all colour is relative.

Here is the video of the above painting. See you soon.